Tag Archives: Bar Cookies

Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars

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Currently cooking out of Baked Explorations by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito

I seem to have a propensity for picking recipes that include combinations that I ordinarily wouldn’t like. For example, although I love peanut butter, I don’t like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

I blame the gazillion of them I ate growing up. In fact, I prefer my peanut butter straight up, or possibly swirled with nutella (oh, nutella, the nectar of the gods. Let me sing your praises . . .) and delivered to my mouth via spoon. No bread required, thankyouverymuch.

But peanut butter and jelly bars . . . I just had to try them.

You start out by making a sweet pastry dough for the bottom crust. I had a bit of problem here. The ingredients called for one egg, but the instructions tell you to “whisk the eggs.” Not sure if I should be using one or two eggs, I started with one, but the dough looked very dry, so I added a second egg. This gave me a very wet dough which baked up into a fairly tough, dense bottom crust. Now I’m thinking that it should only be one egg, but I think some internet sleuthing is in order.

Onward.

Once the pastry dough has chilled, you roll it out, fit it the bottom of your pan and blind bake it. My dough shrank and never got brown in the middle, although the edges were quite brown. I decided to use it anyway.

Next up is the peanut butter filling which consists of peanut butter, butter (as in two TWO! sticks of butter), vanilla and powdered sugar. This gets beaten until smooth and then spread over the cooled crust. Next comes a layer of preserves. I went with seedless blackberry. Finally, you make an oatmeal crumb topping (flour, rolled oats, more butter, leavening, brown sugar and cinnamon) and sprinkle that on top. The bars are baked for 20 to 25 minutes, or until the top is browned. I baked my bars for something like 40 minutes, and the top never got quite brown.

I didn’t like these bars when they were warm, but I liked them a whole lot at room temperature. As I mentioned above, the bottom crust was very hard, but the peanut butter layer, with just a bit of the preserves, was so flavorful. And I loved the oats in the crumb topping. These are pretty rich, so a small piece went a long way.

One other thing to be aware of: These are full of butter, in the crust, in the peanut butter layer and in the crumb topping. I literally had butter running out of the bars when I took them out of the oven. As they cooled, most of the butter seemed to get re-absorbed.

Note: After typing up this post, I emailed the guys at Baked to ask them about the eggs. None other than Matt Lewis himself replied. According to Matt, the ingredient list is correct, only one egg is called for. So, start with one egg, and if you find that your crust is still too dry and crumbly to hold together, add a teaspoon or two of water.

Chocolate Chocolate Cookies

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Currently cooking from Good to the Grain by Kim Boyce

This is not a cookie for people who are on the fence about chocolate. This is a cookie for people who think a chocolate bar isn’t quite chocolatey enough.

As you must know by know, I fall firmly into that later camp.

These cookies have melted chocolate in the batter, chopped chunks of chocolate stirred into the batter and cacao nibs rolled around the batter. About the only way you could get more chocolate into them would be to dip the cookies in melted chocolate. But that might be overkill.

Anyway, if the amount of chocolate is frightening, maybe the fact that there is more than 2 cups of sugar in these cookies will distract you. On the healthy side, all the flour in the recipe is spelt flour. At least you are getting some whole grain goodness alongside the chocolate and sugar.

The recipe starts off by melting chocolate and butter. As those melt, sugar and eggs are whipped together until fluffy and sticky. The melted chocolate and butter are added to the eggs/sugar mixture and combined. Finally, spelt flour, baking powder, salt and chocolate chunks are stirred in. The batter needs to chill for at least two hours before baking, and right before baking, balls of batter are rolled in cacao nibs.

Here’s what I learned:

1. The batter, straight from the fridge, will be extremely thick and heavy and will not want to scoop. My suggestion is to either scoop the batter first, then chill, or let the batter warm up slightly.

2. Boyce says to use two tablespoons of batter for each cookie. That made monster cookies. I’d cut the amount of batter per cookie in half.

3. If you can’t find cacao nibs, anything crunchy will do. I went with slivered almonds. I think these cookies definitely benefit from having something crunchy in them.

4. Use good chocolate. Boyce recommends a chocolate with at least 70 percent cocoa butter. Anything sweeter might give you a toothache.

5. These cookies are best the day they are made. Especially when they are still warm from the oven. With a glass of cold milk.

6. If you don’t have spelt flour, all-purpose will probably work just fine. I couldn’t taste the spelt flour at all.

Chocolate Macaroon Bars

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Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

Do you like coconut? Do you like chocolate? Do you like your brownies dense and moist with just a bit of chew? If you answered yes to all of the above, you must make these, the sooner the better. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll have friends with you when you make them. Otherwise, you might end up eating them all, gaining five pounds and hating me. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

I think these are about the easiest recipe I’ve made out of this book. The only hard part is finding the unsweetened flaked coconut. Fortunately, my local health food store had it in bulk. Don’t even try to make these bar cookies with sweetened flaked coconut. They’ll be waaaaaay to sweet.

The recipe starts out by melting butter, bittersweet and unsweetened chocolates together. Flavorings such as rum, vanilla and coconut extract are stirred in, along with sugar and eggs. Finally, a bit of flour and the afore mentioned coconut are added. With no leavening, the batter didn’t rise at all, but produced moist, slightly chewy, dense bar cookies. The coconut flavor is pretty strong, but not overwhelming, and the flaked coconut gives the bars a nice texture.

The recipe instructs you to make a chocolate glaze and pour it over the bar cookies. This is kind of like adding whipped cream to ice cream. It isn’t a bad thing, but it is totally unnecessary. Unless you really like chocolate, then it is completely necessary.

Coconut-Crusted Key Lime Napoleons

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Currently baking out of Great Cookies by Carole Walter

Out of everything I’ve baked out of this book, these bars are by far my favorite. They are a little time consuming to make, but the finished product is pretty to look at and full of intensely tart key lime flavor.

There are two main components to this recipe. One is a graham cracker crust. The other is a key lime filling made out of key lime juice, sweetened condensed milk, lime zest and a couple of egg yolks. First you put down a layer of the graham cracker crust and bake it. Then you layer on part of the filling and bake it. Then another layer of graham cracker crust goes on and gets baked, followed by a top layer of the filling (which is also baked). Finally, toasted coconut is sprinkled on top, and the bars are left in the fridge for a few hours to firm up.

I could hardly wait to cut into these. The filling is tart but sweet and silky smooth. The graham cracker crusts soften up and lose their crunch, but they add a nice sweetness and a bit of texture to the bars. The bars are intense, so a little goes a long way. I’m already dreaming up ways to use the key lime filling in other desserts.