“You can’t ever mess up.”

My cooking date with Suzy started with those reassuring words as we set out to make Matzo Toffee. Even though I’m a confident cook and play with recipes all the time, always changing them to make them my own, there’s something about Matzo Crunch. Sure, it’s easy to make, with a few simple ingredients, yet I have this vague memory that I messed up once and in a big way. So, I insisted on using a recipe for my batch of the very addictive Matzo Candy (otherwise known as Matzo crack) while Suzy confidently worked from memory on hers. “You don’t need a recipe!” she chided, reminding me how easy this chewy, chocolaty toffee crunch really is. “You can’t mess this one up!” she teased.

My cooking date with Suzy started with those reassuring words as we set out to make Matzo Toffee. Even though I’m a confident cook and play with recipes all the time, always changing them to make them my own, there’s something about Matzo Crunch. Sure, it’s easy to make, with a few simple ingredients, yet I have this vague memory that I messed up once and in a big way. So, I insisted on using a recipe for my batch of the very addictive Matzo Candy (otherwise known as Matzo crack) while Suzy confidently worked from memory on hers.

It was ironic, me with a recipe in hand, while Suzy was free, melting and mixing. It’s usually the other way around as I encourage Suzy to drop the recipe and cook by instinct. But I methodically followed this recipe, step by slow step, to get it just right. And Suzy, stirring the pot next to mine, continued to wing it. But as she whisked, she began to question if her sugar and butter were coming together as mine just did. She began to worry, wondering if everything was going as it should.

At one point, I took Suzy’s advice and deviated slightly from the recipe, which instructed me to let the chips sit on the hot toffee for five minutes, and instead put it back in the oven for a minute. Suzy says that this just speeds the melting process along. The chocolate spread beautifully — smooth, creamy and really perfectly. But when it was Suzy’s turn to melt her chips, they didn’t melt as they had so perfectly done on mine. Instead, they began to congeal in that dreadful way that can happen when you melt chocolate for dipping and it just doesn’t work as it should. Her Matzo Toffee, so easy to make, wasn’t working.

So what did we do? We started to laugh. “You can’t ever mess up.” And as she did the best she could, spreading her chocolate into a thicker, less glossy finish, we decided that chocolate tastes like chocolate no matter what. Was it the mini chips instead of big ones? Or that she had waited a tad too long to begin sprinkling her chips? Did she wait too long to put them back in the oven? We questioned and wondered as I realized this very thing had happened to me once. But we sprinkled an extra handful of nuts on it and by the end you could hardly tell that her batch was different than mine.

So, it turned out she was right. And later that evening as she texted me while eating her Matzo candy:

“Everything turned out great despite rocky start! Matzo crunch tastes amazing despite chip disaster. Told ya u can’t screw it up.”

And the night ended with a smiley face emoticon.