Quick: Passover is only two days away and  you’ve been invited to a seder.  What can you bring for dessert?

That question can be challenging enough for cooks who were raised in the Hebrew tradition and understand all the dietary restrictions on flour and leavening associated with this celebration of the Jews’ escape from Egypt in biblical times.

For the rest of us, there’s matzo crunch.  This addictive treat pairs bland and brittle matzo–an unleavened bread that could qualify as the poster food for Passover–with the caramel and chocolate flavors of toffee.  It’s crisp, sweet and impossible to resist.  Only the most self-disciplined can eat just one piece.

Best of all, you can throw it together in minutes and no one will guess how easy was.  There are only four ingredients–matzo, butter, brown sugar, and chocolate chips.  You can add toasted sliced almonds, if you want, and a sprinkle of sea salt is a great addition. But neither is really necessary.

If your hosts keep strictly kosher, you may need to substitute Passover margarine for butter and make sure you buy kosher brown sugar and chocolate chips, such as those made by Guittard.

You may be familiar with this sweet treat if you’re Jewish.  It’s been making the rounds of  Jewish kitchens  for a couple of decades.  Cookbook author Marcy Goldman first published the recipe in the 1998 edition of “A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking” (republished in paperback by Whitecap Books, 2009). She likes to tell the story of a neighbor giving her a faded photocopy of the recipe, then laughing off Goldman’s comment that she developed the recipe.

I stumbled across the recipe last year about this time on David Lebovitz”s great blog.  If a renowned pastry chef was making it, I figured it must be good.  Even then, I was amazed by how terrific it was.

Since then, I’ve found the recipe in myriad minor variations all over the web.  Some cooks follow Goldman’s recipe to the letter.  Others add vanilla and increase the chocolate chips dramatically.  I like it best with bittersweet chocolate chips in double the amount called for in Goldman’s recipe.

I also bake it at a little lower heat because my first batches came too close to burning.  And I wait until the candy has totally cooled before I break it into pieces.

This confection is so good, I now eagerly await Passover season–when boxes of matzo appear on the shelves of ordinary grocery stores–just so I can make several batches. Some recipes suggest you can use saltine crackers instead of matzo in a pinch, but that sounds too salty for me.

You don’t have to be Jewish to adore matzo crunch.