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.

Caramel Oatmeal Bars (version one)

I can think of few better things to do on a snowy afternoon when Mike is working an event at the Aviary than try a new recipe. This one, though, will need some improvements; baked according to the recipe, it’s not quite what I had hoped it would be.

In order to find caramel oatmeal bar nirvana, I can certainly try different recipes; were I to improve upon this one, I’d make the bottom crust slightly thicker, increase the volume of the chocolate chips to one cup and perhaps switch to milk chocolate, and try pecans instead of walnuts. I might also decrease baking time by five minutes or so to see how everything holds up. Stay tuned for Caramel Oatmeal Bars, version two, in the coming weeks!

Ingredients

1-14 oz. bag Kraft caramels
7 tablespoons heavy cream
2 cups flour
2 cups rolled oats
1 ½ cups packed brown sugar
1 teaspoon baking soda
½ teaspoon salt
1 cup butter, melted
½ cup semisweet chocolate chips
½ cup chopped walnuts

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Line a 9×13 glass baking dish with foil.

Melt butter in the microwave; this can be done while you’re preparing the crust.

Combine flour, oats, brown sugar, baking soda, and salt in a very large bowl.

Add melted butter and stir together until well-moistened, using your hands if necessary.

Press half of the mixture into the bottom of the baking dish and bake for 8 minutes.

Meanwhile, melt caramels and heavy cream in a medium saucepan on low to medium heat, stirring very frequently until smooth.

Remove crust from oven; sprinkle with chocolate chips and walnuts, then pour in the caramel, using a spatula to spread it out and into the corners.

Press the remaining crust mixture on top.

Bake for 25 minutes; cool in baking dish on a wire rack.

Wait until bars are completely cool before cutting.

Lemon Squares

I love lemons! I love them in cooking, in baking, on tea towels, in my kitchen décor…I just love them, for their sunny yellow rinds and their fresh, tart flavor. Lemon squares are, to me, a classic American dessert, a staple at bake sales and church picnics. Every woman in American probably has a recipe for lemon squares somewhere in her arsenal. I know I have several, and yet, until today, I’d never made them from scratch.

Ingredients

1 cup flour
½ cup butter, softened
¼ cup powdered sugar
1 cup granulated sugar
Zest of 1 small to medium-sized lemon
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
½ teaspoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
2 eggs
Powdered sugar for dusting

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

In a mixing bowl, combine flour, butter, and powdered sugar and mix on low speed until small, pea-sized crumbs form.

Press into bottom of an 8x8x2 baking dish.

Bake for 20 minutes; meanwhile, prepare filling.

Beat granulated sugar, lemon zest, lemon juice, baking powder, salt, and eggs until pale yellow and somewhat fluffy (but not meringue-like fluffy), about 3-5 minutes.

Pour over hot crust and bake for 25 minutes, until no indentation remains when touched lightly in center.

Cool and dust with powdered sugar.

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