Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Bars

Sometimes I wonder who invented bar-style cookies. A woman without a lot of time of her hands, perhaps? Bars are a great options for picnics and potlucks, offering all of the deliciousness of cookies with much less baking time. Convenient and tasty…always a good combination.

These oatmeal chocolate chip bars came from Buns in My Oven, another baking blog that I found while looking for fun, easy-to-bake bar recipes. I really like oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and these bars are very similar, though I think the next time I make them I’ll add a dash of cinnamon to the dough to kick up the flavor a bit.

I highly suggest warming these up and serving them with vanilla ice cream, or perhaps spreading on some peanut butter, if you’re looking for serving suggestions. You could also just eat them standing up at your sink in the middle of the night. Who am I to judge?

Ingredients

2 1/2 cups old fashioned oats
2 cups flour
1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon vanilla
2 eggs
1 1/4 cups butter, melted
2 cups milk chocolate chips

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 9 x 13 baking pan with nonstick spray.

Combine oats, flour, brown sugar, baking soda, salt, vanilla, eggs, and melted butter in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a paddle attachment and beat until combined. Dough will be very thick, so you’ll want to scrape down the sides a few times to make sure you get all of your dry ingredients incorporated.

Stir in chocolate chips, then pour dough into prepared pan, spreading it out as best you can.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until a cake tester comes out mostly clean with a few moist crumbs. Bars will look slightly underdone, but that’s what you want – be careful not to over-bake.

Allow to cool for 1 hour, then cut into squares.

Pecan Pie Bars

The good news: pecans are a great source of manganese, a mineral that has many benefits to overall health. Pecans are also a good source of protein and omega-6 fatty acids, and can help lower cholesterol.

The bad news: the health benefits of pecans may be canceled out by the cup and a half of corn syrup, cup and a half of sugar, and four eggs that are also included in this recipe.

The next time I make these I think I’m going to reduce the filling ingredients by about one-fourth, so that the filling doesn’t bubble over the sides of the pan. If I do so, I’ll post an adapted recipe here so everyone can have the ratios.

These bars were for my brother Andy on his birthday, as he is a fan of pecan pie.

Ingredients

For the crust

2 cups flour
1/3 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
12 tablespoons butter, cold, cut into small cubes

For the filling

4 eggs
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 1/2 cups light corn syrup
3 tablespoons butter, melted
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups chopped pecans

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Spray a 15 x 10 x 1 pan with baking spray.

In a large bowl, combine flour, sugar, and salt. Cut in butter until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs; I also used my hands to get a more even consistency.

Press into the bottom of the pan in an even layer; bake for 20 minutes.

With a few minutes left on your crust baking time, prepare the filling. In a large bowl whisk eggs, sugar, corn syrup, melted butter, and vanilla until well combined. Stir in pecans.

Carefully pour filling over hot crust and return to the oven, baking for 25-30 minutes or until filling is set. Note: your pan will be very, very full so move it carefully; I placed a larger baking pan on the rack beneath mine to catch the drips, and my filling bubbled over a bit so I’m glad I did.

Remove from oven and cool on a wire rack completely before cutting.

Apple Crumb Bars

I will not be intimidated by caramel. Not even when I completely fail at a recipe for caramel apple shortbread and turn said caramel into something that could have probably been used as a weapon, so sharp were its edges.

Full disclosure: I’m no confectioner. I’m far better with baked goods than I am with candies, which is what caramel is, really. So when the failed recipe didn’t turn out, I chalked it up partially to my inexperience with this finicky substance and partially to the blogger who wrote some less-than-clear instructions regarding the length of time one needs to cook her caramel and what it will look like at different stages in preparation. Hint: “bubbly” and “glossy” are rather subjective terms, and I clearly have a very different opinion about what those words mean. Step-by-step photos of the process would have been immensely helpful, but there were none to be had. Anyway…

Realizing that I definitely need more practice with caramel-ish substances, I found an apple crumb bar recipe that includes a caramel apple layer between two crumb layers, and it turned out very well. I’m not a big fan of cooked fruit, even apples, but Mike proclaimed these bars delicious.

Ingredients

For the crumb layers:

3 cups flour
1 1/2 cups old-fashioned oats
3/4 cup white sugar*
3/4 cup packed dark brown sugar*
3/4 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup plus 2 tablespoons butter, cut into cubes

For the caramel apple layer:

4 medium apples, diced (I used 2 Granny Smiths and 2 Empires)
1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons cornstarch
1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla
2 tablespoons butter, cut into small pieces
1 cup cold water

*If you prefer, you can use 1 1/2 cups packed light brown sugar instead of the white/dark brown mix.

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9 x 13 baking pan with parchment paper and spray lightly with baking spray.

In a large bowl, combine flour, oats, sugars, baking soda, and salt; stir to combine. Rub in the butter with your hands until the mixture looks like coarse crumbs; you can also cut the butter in using a pastry blender, but I found the rubbing method to be much easier.

Reserve 2 cups of crumb mixture for topping; press the remaining crumb mixture into the prepared baking dish and set aside.

Sprinkle diced apples evenly over the crumb layer.

In a medium saucepan, combine sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla, butter, and water. Stir constantly and bring to a boil; once the mixture begins to boil, cook and stir for 2 minutes until the mixture is thickened and bubbly and looks like the photo below.

Pour the caramel mixture over the apples and sprinkle the remaining crumbs on top.

Bake for 38-40 minutes, until golden brown. Remove from oven and cool completely before serving; I put mine in the fridge overnight so the caramel would set up well.

You’ll want your caramel spice mixture to look like this. Don’t be intimidated by the caramel!

Heath Bit Bars

This week at the office, my purchase of a Twix precipitated a discussion about favorite candy bars. There was great debate; some folks are Milky Way and Three Musketeers fans, while others (including me) favor Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Snickers bars, or those ingenious Take 5 bars that include a pretzel, caramel, peanut butter, peanuts, and milk chocolate all in one delicious little package.

I’m also a big fan of the Heath bar, and with that ind mind, I picked up some Heath Milk Chocolate Bits in the baking aisle yesterday. There’s a great recipe on the bag for Heath bit peanut butter cookies that I fully intend to bake sometime, but because I also had the Twix bar on my mind, I decided to make a treat that would sort of combine the best of both worlds: a bar with a shortbread-like crust, milk chocolate chips, and Heath bits.

This recipe is adapted from one that I found on the Hershey’s website that used plain toffee bits, rather than Heath Milk Chocolate Bits. Next time, I’d like to sprinkle on some chopped pecans, or maybe even chopped salted peanuts, to add another dimension of flavor. You’re supposed to wait until these bars have cooled completely before you cut them, but as you can see by the glossy chocolate in the photo above, I simply couldn’t wait.

Ingredients

1 cup butter, at room temperature
1 cup packed light brown sugar
2 cups flour
1 egg yolk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 12-ounce package milk chocolate chips
1 cup Heath Milk Chocolate Bits

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a mixing bowl, beat butter at medium speed for 1-2 minutes, until fluffy.

Add brown sugar, egg yolk, and vanilla and mix well.

Add flour and mix until combined.

Press crust mixture into the bottom of a 10 x 15 x 1 jelly roll pan, smoothing with an offset spatula as best you can for even browning.

Bake for 22-25 minutes, until top is golden brown.

Remove from oven and sprinkle immediately with chocolate chips. After about 5 minutes, spread melting chips with an offset spatula to cover the crust completely. Sprinkle on Heath Milk Chocolate Bits and let stand for just a moment, then spread with an offset spatula.

Allow to cool completely before cutting.

Peanut Butter Cup Cookie Bars

As far as peanut butter goes, I’m a Jif loyalist. My mom was one of the choosy moms who chose Jif in my childhood, and as such I find pretty much every other brand inferior.

Jif introduced its creamy peanut butter in 1958 and the extra crunchy variety in 1974. Why there isn’t just “crunchy” peanut butter, I’m not sure, but you can use either smooth or crunchy for this recipe. I had a jar of extra crunchy on hand, so I decided to use that, along with chopped Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins. You could certainly use regular chopped peanut butter cups or milk chocolate chips if you prefer; just adjust the quantity to 1 3/4 cups.

A note of caution for your oven: this recipe bakes in a 10 x 15 x 1 pan, and mine puffed up and spilled over the sides, dripping quick-to-burn cookie bits on my oven floor. Next time, I’ll place a cookie sheet lined with parchment beneath the pan to catch the drips. This recipe can also be baked as individual cookies; just scoop them out, flatten them with the bottom of a glass dipped in sugar, and bake for about 8 minutes.

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
1 cup butter, softened
1/2 cup extra crunchy peanut butter
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 egg
7 Reese’s Peanut Butter Pumpkins, chopped

Preparation

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment and place a 10 x 15 x 1 jelly roll pan on the parchment. You do not need to grease the pan.

In a small bowl, combine flour and baking soda; set aside.

In a mixing bowl, combine sugar, brown sugar, butter, peanut butter, and vanilla and beat until very well combined.

Scrape down the sides of the bowl and add the egg, beating until combined.

Scrape down the sides of the bowl again and gradually add the flour mixture.

Stir in chopped peanut butter pumpkins.

Spread dough in the ungreased pan and smooth the top with a small offset spatula.

Bake for 15-18 minutes, until golden brown but still puffy in the middle.

Cool completely on a wire rack before cutting.

Using a small offse

Toffee Bars

Although I’ve eaten toffee many times, until today I didn’t know how it was made. Similar to caramel, toffee is created by caramelizing sugar (or molasses) with butter and bringing it to “hard crack stage,” a term employed in candy making that equates to about 300 degrees.

My experience with toffee has usually come in the form of the Heath bar, a wonderful concoction of toffee covered in chocolate. These bars taste a great deal like Heath bars and are easier to make than one might think at first glance, as they employ sweetened condensed milk and butter to create the toffee layer.

Just a few tips: you’ll want to be sure to cut the bars and remove them from the pan within minutes of pouring on the chocolate layer, as I can imagine them being difficult to pry out otherwise. I found that using a small offset spatula to spread the chocolate layer worked out well; you’ll also want to use a small offset spatula to remove the bars from the pan once you’ve cut them.

Ingredients

For the crust:

8 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup flour

For the toffee layer:

2 tablespoons butter
1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
2 teaspoons vanilla extract

For the chocolate layer:

2 tablespoons butter
1 ounce unsweetened chocolate
1 1/2 cups powdered sugar, sifted
1 teaspoon vanilla
4 teaspoons hot water

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Prepare the crust; in a mixing bowl, cream together butter, sugar, and salt. Add flour and mix with a wooden spoon, then with your hands, until a soft dough forms. Press into the bottom of a 9 x 13 pan and bake for 12-15 minutes, until edges are golden brown.

While crust is baking, prepare toffee layer; in a medium saucepan, combine butter and sweetened condensed milk and cook over medium heat until bubbly, stirring constantly. Continue to cook for another 5 minutes, stirring constantly, until mixture thickens. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla; immediately pour and spread over hot crust. Bake for 12-15 minutes, until golden brown. Remove baking dish from oven and allow to cool for just a few minutes while you prepare the chocolate layer.

For the chocolate layer, in a medium saucepan, combine butter and chocolate over low heat and allow to melt, stirring frequently. Remove from heat and add powdered sugar, vanilla, and 2 teaspoons hot water. Stir until very smooth; if necessary, add 2 additional teaspoons hot water, 1 at a time, to reach a very pourable consistency. Spread over warm bars.

Using a very sharp knife, cut bars and immediately remove from pan. Cool on a wire rack.

Fab Four Bars

Chocolate chip cookies, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, Double Stuf Oreos, and dark chocolate brownies are among my favorites. But all four, in the same treat? Now that is fabulous.

One of the gals in my office made these recently and proclaimed them to be amazing, so I thought I’d give them a try. You could certainly make the cookie dough and brownie batter from scratch, but for convenience’s sake I chose to experiment with the store-bought versions.

A few suggestions: you certainly need your cookie dough to be pliable, so let it sit out on the counter top for about 10 minutes, then dust your hands with flour before you press it into the pan. While I baked my Fab Fours for about 40 minutes and the brownies were done on the pan’s edges, about one inch in from the edges they were gooey as could be. If you like gooey brownies, that’s probably fine, but you need to be careful about proper cooking times since brownie batter contains raw egg and raw egg can be dangerous. I might let mine bake another 5 minutes or so next time.

Trust me: you want to cut these into small squares, not huge slabs. They’re incredibly rich so you really only need a small piece to get the full effect. Enjoy!

Ingredients

Two 16-ounce tubes refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough
16 regular-sized Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups
16 Double Stuf Oreos, chopped into large chunks
1 box dark chocolate brownie mix

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Line a 9 x 13 glass baking dish with parchment paper, allowing the paper to extend over on all four sides.

Allow cookie dough to stand at room temperature for about 10 minutes, then press it into the bottom of the parchment-lined pan.

Place peanut butter cups top-side down on the cookie dough, spacing evenly.

Sprinkle Oreo chunks over/around the peanut butter cups.

Pour brownie batter over the top and smooth with a spatula as much as possible.

Bake for at least 40 minutes; cool in pan on a wire rack.

Banana Chocolate Chip Bars

Something has gone awry in my homemade vanilla extract. For the past three months I’ve been steeping a vanilla bean in vodka in a well-sealed glass bottle in the dark recesses of one of my kitchen cabinets, a process I learned after buying a few vanilla beans on our honeymoon at Colonial Williamsburg 13 years ago. I’ve made countless batches of homemade extract since then, and they’ve all turned out well. Alas, this bottle had unpleasant globs of some unidentifiable substance floating in the otherwise lovely amber liquid, rendering it unusable.

Finding myself completely out of commercial vanilla (how that happened, I will never know), I resorted to the vanilla beans in my pantry. This is one of the many things I love about baking—that you can improvise. Although most cooks believe baking to be too restrictive, requiring precise measurements of this and that, I find it liberating to substitute vanilla extract with the scraped seeds of a vanilla bean, or to use up my miniature semisweet chocolate chips and mix them in with milk chocolate ones for this recipe. While I intend to scour the internet for various troubleshooting tips for making homemade vanilla, it seems that the bean did just fine.

Ingredients

12 tablespoons butter, softened
2/3 cup sugar
2/3 cup packed light brown sugar
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 cup mashed very ripe bananas
1 vanilla bean
2 cups flour
1/4 cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips
3/4 cup milk chocolate chips

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Grease a 10 x 15 x 1 jelly roll pan; set aside.

In a mixing bowl, beat butter on medium speed for 30 seconds.

Add white and brown sugars, baking powder, and salt; cream together until fluffy.

Split vanilla bean in half and scrape out the seeds; discard the pod.

Add egg, mashed bananas, and vanilla bean seeds; beat until well-blended.

Add flour and beat until combined.

Stir in chocolate chips.

Pour batter into pan and smooth with an offset spatula to even out the top.

Bake for 25 minutes, until the top is totally set and begins to turn golden.

Cool completely in the pan; cut into squares and store in an airtight container between sheets of waxed paper.

Shortbread Bars

You’d think that someone who isn’t eating sweets for four months wouldn’t torture herself by baking flaky, buttery shortbread studded with miniature semisweet chocolate chips. And yet.

This recipe is an adaptation, in both ingredients and process. The original recipe called for dried cranberries instead of chocolate chips, mixing the dough with a spoon, and then, to my great shock, cutting the finished product into heart shapes and discarding the remaining scraps. Since I had some miniature chocolate chips on hand, I easily substituted those for the cranberries, and I found that rubbing the butter into the dry ingredients with my hands was far easier than using a spoon. As for discarding the remaining scraps, well, only someone who isn’t in their right mind would waste perfectly good shortbread.

Just a few tips for this recipe: you want your butter to be at room temperature, but not too soft. The flour and powdered sugar should be sifted before measuring, which is why this isn’t written “3/4 cup powdered sugar, sifted.” And while using your hands will be messy, it will also be infinitely easier than trying to stir the dough together with a spoon.

Ingredients

1 cup butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup sifted powdered sugar
2 cups sifted flour
1 1/4 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup miniature semisweet chocolate chips

Preparation

Preheat oven to 325 degrees.

In a large bowl, combine butter, powdered sugar, flour, vanilla, and salt.

Using your hands, rub the butter into the dry ingredients until a well-combined and soft dough forms.

Add chocolate chips and, again using your hands, incorporate them into the dough.

Press the dough evenly into an 8 x 8 baking dish.

Bake for 30-35 minutes, until firm and pale golden.

Let cool on a wire rack for about 20 minutes.

Invert pan onto a cutting board and cut into squares.

Allow to cool completely on a wire rack.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars

My dear friend Bryan lives in New Mexico, and he’s very supportive of my baking endeavors. I promised to bake and blog something just for him, so, ta daaa, chocolate peanut butter bars!

Bryan and I worked together in the visitor services department at the National Building Museum in DC; I believe we first bonded over having grown up sixty miles apart in Wheeling, WV and Pittsburgh respectively. One of my favorite memories with Bryan is the day he and I conducted visitor services research (read: ran around checking out signage, exhibits, and having great fun) at other museums. Though we lost touch for a while because of job changes and moves, I was happy to reconnect with Bryan on Facebook, where you can find us liking each others statuses every five minutes.

I admire Bryan for many reasons. He’s a therapist, so he helps people make sense of their lives. He’s a great husband, doing thoughtful, awesome things for his husband Paul. He is passionately committed to causes that are of great interest to me, and he’s the kind of person who states his position with not only great conviction, but respect for alternative points of view.

If I could manage to ship these tasty bars to Bryan, I would! They feature oats, chocolate chips, and peanut butter, which are among my favorite things, and therefore fitting for one of my favorite people.

Ingredients

2 cups oats
1 3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1 cup flour
1/2 cup whole wheat flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 cup butter, slightly softened
1/2 cup chopped peanuts
1 12-ounce package semisweet chocolate chips
1 beaten egg
1 14-ounce can sweetened condensed milk
1/3 cup peanut butter

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a large mixing bowl, combine oats, brown sugar, flours, baking powder, and baking soda.

Add butter and rub in with your hands until the mixture resembles coarse crumbs.

Stir in peanuts.

In a separate bowl, combine 1 3/4 oat mixture with chocolate chips; set aside to use as topping.

In a large measuring cup, combine peanut butter and sweetened condensed milk and whisk until smooth; set aside to use as filling.

Add beaten egg to remainder of oat mixture and mix well; press into bottom of a 15x10x1 pan.

Bake for 15 minutes; remove from oven and pour filling over bottom crust, then top with chocolate chip oat mixture.

Bake for another 15-20 minutes, until golden brown.

Cool on a wire rack.

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