“I always give out my recipes,” Neil Zevnik, Elizabeth Taylor’s former personal chef, tells TODAY.com. “I’m not one of those chefs.”
He was Taylor’s personal chef for nearly a decade in the ‘90s, and says her favorite dessert always had to be within arm’s reach.
“She had a little tiny refrigerator under one of her nightstands and I would keep a container of Toffee Fudgies in there at all times,” he says. “Should she be seized with the desire for a Toffee Fudgie, it was right there on hand.”
The recipe for Elizabeth Taylor’s Toffee Fudgies — exclusively shared with TODAY.com — makes a dessert that’s “midway between a brownie and fudge,” he says. It’s like edible brownie batter, suspended in gooey animation.
Zevnik says the treat had gone through “significant changes” over the years to be more suited to Taylor’s liking, and has since become a “signature dish” of his.
Zevnik warns that the Fudgies “are REALLY rich,” which also a way to describe their benefactor’s jewelry collection. Zevnik says he and Taylor often chatted about her multimillion-dollar baubles as they hung out in the kitchen.
“I’m very focused when I cook, but there were many times in between cooking ... where we would sit and talk about all kinds of stuff,” he says, “about life and about relationships and the state of the world, and then other times we would talk about jewelry.”
That includes the 33.19-karat Krupp Diamond (later named the Elizabeth Taylor diamond) gifted to her by Richard Burton, the man she married twice.
“She had been to an event the night before she was sitting in bed reading or something, and the ring was still on her hand, just lying there, and I looked down at the ring, and I said, ‘May I?’” Zevnik remembers. “She sort of held up her hand and put it on top of my hand and took a beat and said, ‘Vulgar, isn’t it?’”
Giant gems didn’t preclude her from everyday pleasures, though: At the Thanksgiving buffets she hosted, she'd pile fried turkey legs and “cranberry jelly out of the can” onto her plate. She also liked to seat kids, adults, celebrities and noncelebs together at her parties to even the social playing field.
“She was a very down-to-earth, basic person,” Zevnik recalls. “When she was at home, she was not a diva.” And she just wanted to eat Fudgies.
Elizabeth Taylor’s Toffee Fudgies
Recipe by Neil Zevnik
Ingredients
- 10 ounces semisweet and bittersweet chocolate, chopped
- 2 sticks (8 ounces) unsalted butter
- 1½ cups cake flour
- 3 tablespoons unsweetened alkalized cocoa powder
- 1 tablespoon espresso powder
- 1/2 teaspoon salt
- 1 bag Heath toffee bits
- 5 large eggs
- 2 cups superfine granulated sugar
- 1/3 cup dark brown sugar
- 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
- 1 teaspoon chocolate extract (optional)
Preparation
- Preheat the oven to 325 F. Spray inside of a 9x13 pan with nonstick cooking spray (I use the “butter” one).
- Melt chocolate and butter over a double-boiler, stirring until smooth. Cool slightly.
- In a large bowl, whisk together the cake flour, cocoa powder, espresso powder and salt. Stir in the Heath bits.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the eggs, granulated and brown sugars, and vanilla and chocolate extracts until well blended. Pour 1/4 of the chocolate-butter mix into the egg mixture, whisking as you do, then pour the egg mixture back into the chocolate mixture and whisk until well-blended.
- Pour the egg and chocolate mixture over the dry ingredients, and stir until dry ingredients are just incorporated.
- Scrape batter into pan and smooth top. Bake for 30 minutes; center will be soft but not liquid, edges will begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. Cool, then refrigerate for at least 2 hours, preferably overnight. Cut into small rectangles, about 1x2 inches.
- Store in the fridge, and preferably eat at room temp. They keep well for a week or so.
