Chocolate-Toffee Matzo Bark with Easter Candy

When you develop sweets and treats for a living, as I do, the people in your life tend to expect abundant, exceptionally yummy baked goods on the regular. Generally, I have no problem with this; I am completely on board with making delicious things for the ones I love! But every spring, because our families celebrate two different holidays, my treat-making gets just the tiniest bit harried. Enter my baking savior: matzo bark.

I first discovered matzo bark when a Seder guest brought it to share post-meal. I was serving the standbys, namely flourless chocolate cake and coconut macaroons with mini chocolate chips, but to say that they played second (and third) fiddle to the bark is an understatement. It was impossible to eat just one piece of the stuff, and so I ate many — as did everyone else.

Before creating my own version, I dug into matzo bark’s history. The original version, often called chocolate toffee “crack,” calls for saltines. It was cookbook writer Marcy Goldman who first subbed crackers for matzo to create “matzo buttercrunch,” as she calls it in her book Jewish Holiday Baking. Since then, Kitchn, David Lebovitz and Smitten Kitchen, to name just a few, have published versions of Goldman’s recipe.

My own recipe took shape pretty quickly. I am Jewish and my husband is Catholic, which means my matzo bark is a culinary hodgepodge meant to satisfy all the sweet teeth in the room, regardless of religious upbringing or faith. I tinkered with the original recipe just a bit, increasing the salt and vanilla in the toffee and calling for a tad less chocolate. But where I really put my stamp on it is topping it with Easter candy, a move that not only excited the younger set and made the bark appear more festive, but one that paid the most delicious homage to my hybrid family of four, and the two holidays that we celebrate each year. (Moreover, it is worth noting that once the celebrations for each are over, it’s a pretty spectacular way to use up both the half-eaten box of matzo as weIl as the pastel colored Easter candy hiding in the bottom of my boys’ baskets).

If you, too, celebrate both Passover and Easter, consider topping your matzo bark with Easter candy (just be sure to double check the candy is Kosher for Passover). After adding your pink, blue, and yellow candies of choice, a sprinkle of flaky sea salt does wonders for cutting the sweetness of the candy and elevates the bark in a way everyone can get behind.