Sticky Toffee Waffles
Every time we encounter a delicious baked good when out to eat, my husband asks me to recreate it. My curse: it takes a lot of work, but I can.
The recipe
Yield: 16 small waffles
Time: 3 hours plus an overnight rise, or 5 hours
Ingredients
Waffles:
1 black tea bag
440 g (3 and ½ c) all-purpose flour
9 g (1 tsp) salt
8 g (2 tsp) instant yeast
32 g (2 tbsp) light brown sugar
113 g (1 stick or 8 tbsp) salted butter, room temperature
120 g (¾ c) chopped dates
14 g (1 tbsp) vanilla
2 large eggs
190 g (1 c) pearl sugar (or 1 c broken-up sugar cubes)
Toffee sauce:
¾ stick (6 tbsp) salted butter, cubed
½ c (105 g) heavy cream
¼ c plus 2 tbsp (75 g) light brown sugar
½ tsp (5 g) salt
2 tsp (10 g) vanilla extract
Vanilla ice cream for serving (optional)
Instructions
Waffles:
1. Make the tea: pour ⅓ c (80 g) of boiling water over the tea bag and let it steep for 5 minutes. After that, remove the tea bag and add enough cool water to bring the total amount up to ½ c (120 g). The tea should be warm, but not hot and steaming.
2. Place all the ingredients except the pearl sugar in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the dough hook attachment. Mix on medium-low speed until everything is well combined and the dough begins to pull away from the sides, about 5 minutes.
3. Place the dough in an ungreased container, cover it, and leave it in a warm place to rise until doubled, about 2 hours.
Toffee sauce:
1. While the dough is rising, make the toffee sauce. Combine the butter, heavy cream, sugar, and salt in a saucepan.
2. Bring the mixture to a boil and let it boil for 5 minutes, until it starts to thicken.
3. Turn off the heat, stir in the vanilla extract, and transfer the sauce to a heatproof container. If you aren’t serving the waffles until tomorrow, cover and refrigerate the sauce.
Waffles:
1. After the dough has doubled in size, turn it out onto a clean counter and flatten into a circle or rectangle.
2. Sprinkle the pearl sugar on the dough, fold the edges into the middle, and knead the dough until the sugar is evenly distributed throughout. Form it into a ball and place it back in its bowl, covered.
3. If you are going to make the waffles today, leave the dough to rise in a warm place until doubled again, another 2 hours. If you are baking them later, cover them and leave them to rise in the fridge for 6 hours and up to two days.
4. When you’re ready to make the waffles, preheat a Belgian waffle iron and oil it. (I can’t give exact cooking instructions because every waffle iron is different, but mine went on medium-high.)
5. Turn the waffle dough out onto a clean counter. (It will be really sticky on the outside, but this is what you want!) Divide the dough into 16 even sections.
6. Warm the toffee sauce in the microwave until it’s hot and liquid.
7. When the waffle iron is preheated, place one ball of dough in the middle of it and cook until it’s dark golden brown on the outside.
8. Remove the waffle from the iron and it should crisp up as it sits. Top with ice cream and toffee sauce and eat while hot.
9. Once you have your waffle iron settings dialed in, you can make four waffles at once, one in each quadrant.
Notes and tips
Don’t be put off by the large serving size. Each waffle is small (¼ of a normal waffle) and holds 1 small scoop of ice cream.
I put the weight first because I prefer to bake this recipe, like breads, by weight instead of volume.
You can use either Swedish or Belgian pearl sugar to make these waffles. It’s a specialty ingredient, but easily found online. I got mine from King Arthur Baking. If you don’t want to bother, you can gently crush up sugar cubes into pea-size chunks. The only drawback to sugar cubes is a lot of extra sugar dust when you crush them.
I recommend making these waffles overnight: prepping the dough and sauce a day ahead of time, then leaving it in the fridge and pulling it out right before you want to bake and serve.
The method for these waffles is a little bit like bread dough: you knead it all together in a mixer and it has two rises. But it differs from bread in a few key ways. You don’t want it develop that much gluten, so you knead it for a lot less time. The rising times are also quite long because the dough has so much butter and sugar in it, which slows the yeast.
Even if you have a non-stick waffle iron, grease it well! These babies are reaaaaaally sticky. I dip a pastry brush in oil and use that to coat all the nooks and crannies before each batch of waffles goes in.
You’re looking for a waffle that is crunchy on the outside, but not so hard that it’s difficult to cut and chew when it cools. Like with pancakes, it might take a few tries to get the doneness right.
Okay, the sticky sugar might make a mess when you go to clean out your waffle iron. Use a heat-proof brush and clean the iron out between every other batch of waffles and once again at the end while the iron is still warm. You can also wait until the iron is cool and use a toothpick to gently scrape off the caramelized sugar. You may need to reheat it a little to make the caramel oozy again, but it should come off easily then.
The story
I thought I was a waffle sundae connoisseur. I’d grown up eating them at every ice cream place that serves them, and I knew a good Belgian waffle when I tasted it (crisp, hot, light and springy in the middle), but when my husband and I went to Nina’s Waffles & Ice Cream, I saw I’d been dead wrong. Their sundaes were a level of transcendently delicious I hadn’t known was possible, everything a waffle sundae should’ve and could’ve been all those years. A normal Belgian waffle is so light it gets crushed by the ice cream and turns soggy when it melts. The first bite is heaven and the last bite is just okay. But at Nina’s, they make liège waffles, crunchy and caramelized on the outside, dense in texture, like a brioche, so they stood up well to ice cream. They kept their delicious chew and crunchy outside to the last bite. I’d never heard of such a thing as a liège waffle before. I was obsessed.
BC, my husband, insisted I recreate them. But I didn’t want to mess with perfection. I couldn’t beat this! And I needed pearl sugar, a specialty ingredient that would turn people off wanting to bake them. Would this recipe be a service to anyone if they were that much work to attempt? But then I thought about how local a chain Nina’s is. My readers who don’t live in driving distance would never be able to experience waffle sundae perfection. And that thought made me so very, very sad. I had to do it. I had to recreate them.
It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be. Liège waffles take more doing than your Bisquick breakfast variety, but they’re easier to make than bread. It was hard to get them wrong. Every single test batch I made was delicious. Heavenly, even. So heavenly that when I baked 8 waffles for my family, they had their plates licked clean in 2 minutes flat and asked for seconds. Which is where the large serving size (16 portions) comes in. These are small waffles, and you’re not going to have leftovers, trust me.
The only flaw in this blissful dream of a recipe is that cleanup is a pain. (Which was going to be the case anyway; the hassle of cleaning out a waffle iron keeps me from getting it out for a weekday breakfast.) But the caramelization you get on the outside of these liège waffles is worth the mess. The sugar chunks in the dough draw out moisture and create a sticky syrup, which seems wrong (weeping anything is usually a bad sign in baking), but is exactly what you want. When that syrup hits the hot plates, it forms a sweet, crackly crust you won’t get any other way.
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😍 pearl sugar! I’ve also had it in pancakes at a brunch place in the city and it’s so key