Toffee Crunch-Chocolate Chip Cookies

These cookies pack three kinds of crunch into every bite: chopped toffee candy bars, pecan halves, and semi-sweet chocolate pieces, all held together by a buttery oat dough with dark brown sugar depth. The food processor does the heavy mixing here, creaming the butter and shortening with both sugars in seconds, then pulsing the dry ingredients and nuts together so the pecans get roughly chopped right in the dough.

The combination of butter and shortening is deliberate. Butter brings flavor while shortening keeps the cookies from spreading too flat, giving you a thicker, chewier result. Rolled oats add a hearty, slightly nutty texture to the base that stands up to all those chunky mix-ins.

These brown fast on the bottom, so watch them carefully after 8 minutes. You want golden on top and just barely set in the center. They’ll firm up as they cool on the baking sheet.

Pro Tips

• Bake one sheet at a time on the middle rack for even browning. Two sheets at once means the bottom one burns while the top one stays pale
• Check at 8 minutes. These cookies go from golden to overdone quickly because of all the sugar in the toffee
• Let cookies cool slightly on the sheet before transferring to a wire rack. Moving them too soon and they’ll fall apart
• Stir the chocolate pieces in by hand after processing. The food processor will chop them too small

Variations

• Use Heath bar pieces instead of generic toffee candy for a classic butterscotch-toffee flavor
• Swap pecans for walnuts or macadamia nuts
• Add a sprinkle of flaky sea salt on top of each cookie right after baking for a sweet-salty contrast