TWD: Snickery Squares

The Snickers Bar is my all-time favorite candy bar. I often flirt with other candy bars… Reese Peanut Butter Cups, M&Ms, etc… but I always go back to the Snickers. It’s just the perfect mix of chocolatey, crunchy, gooey, chewy, sweet and salty all in one bite.

So, initially I was excited about the Tuesdays with Dorie recipe for this week, picked by Erin of Dinner & Dessert. She choose Snickery Squares.

Yay! Snickers!

Then, I read through the recipe and looked at the picture. Hmph. These sure don’t look like Snickers bars, I decided. I love shortbread, but shortbread in my snickers??? I don’t know about all that business.

Upon reading the recipe I realized that I didn’t have 3 things mentioned in this recipe.

A food processor
A pastry brush
An 8x8 square pan

Jeez. So, I ended up making and baking the shortbread crust at my parent’s house on Saturday, using their food processor and also borrowing an 8x8 square pan. Then I left the shortbread hanging out in the fridge from Saturday till Monday, when I finally made the bars. I bought a fancy dancy pastry brush at Target. I really feel like 6.99 is too much to spend on such an item, but… I felt like the cheaper ones they had would just shed and I didn’t want to be gagging on bristles while I was enjoying my faux snickers

Fancy Dancy Pastry Brush. $6.99 Target.

The candying of the peanuts was interesting. At first, while I was letting the sugar “color” I was able to flit around the kitchen, making dinner, flipping through cookbooks, etc… occasionally brushing the sides of the pan with my fancy dancy pastry brush and saying to myself.. jeez. What’s the big deal about making candy??? This is a breeze.

And then as time went on, I started to wonder about the sugar. What does “just start to color” really mean? Color at all? Or color as in start to turn caramel colored? I let it color a little bit… meaning, I could tell that it was starting to color, but I let it color just a little bit more. Then I threw my peanuts in. And yes, they turned white just like Dorie mentioned. But, I wasn’t prepared for the constantly stirring for about 20 minutes that ensued. I totally thought I cooked the sugar too long, because for like 15 minutes the sugar was coloring, but it was all clumpy and not caramel-y with the peanuts. It was like forming its own little mini peanuts. I cranked the heat up and that seemed to help… eventually it all came together.

Here’s the thing though…. I thought that these peanuts were going to taste like the peanuts in snickers. But they don’t. They taste like the peanuts in cracker jack (which I really really dislike). So when I anxiously cut into it and tasted my first square. I took one bite and tossed the rest of the square in the trash. Yuck. The peanuts totally ruined it for me. I think I would have liked it better with just the peanuts layered in, instead of candied.

Oh well. Win some, lose some and at least I conquered the candy peanuts. Those rascally little attention-screaming bastards.

Soundtrack: John Legend's Get Lifted. I love to groove when I’m in the kitchen and this was the perfect accompaniment to standing over the stove stirring peanuts for so long.

Snickery Squares

For the Crust:
1 cup all-purpose flour¼ cup sugar2 TBSP powdered sugar¼ tsp salt1 stick unsalted butter, cut into small pieces and chilled1 large egg yolk, lightly beaten

For the Filling:
½ cup sugar3 TBSP water1 ½ cups salted peanutsAbout 1 ½ cups store-bought dulce de leche

For the Topping:
7 ounces bittersweet, coarsely chopped½ stick unsalted butter, cut into 8 pieces, at room temperature

Getting Ready:
Preheat oven to 350F. Butter a 8 inch square pan and put it on a baking sheet.

To Make the Crust:
Toss the flour, sugar, powdered sugar and salt into a food processor and pulse a few times to combine. Toss in the pieces of cold butter and pulse about 12 times, until the mixture looks like coarse meal. Pour the yolk over the ingredients and pulse until the dough forms clumps and curds-stop before the dough comes together in a ball.Turn the dough into the buttered pan and gently press it evenly across the bottom of the pan. Prick the dough with a fork and slide the sheet into the oven.Bake the crust for 15-20 minutes, or until it takes on just a little color around the edges. Transfer the pan to a rack and cool to room temperature before filling.

To Make the Filling:
Have a parchment or silicone mat-lined baking sheet at the ready, as well as a long-handled wooden spoon and a medium heavy bottomed saucepan.Put the sugar and water in the saucepan and cook over medium-high heat, stirring, until the sugar dissolves. Keeping the heat fairly high, continue to cook the sugar, without stirring, until it just starts to color. Toss the peanuts and immediately start stirring. Keep stirring, to coat the peanuts with sugar. Within a few minutes, they will be covered with sugar and turn white—keep stirring until the sugar turns back into caramel. When the peanuts are coated with a nice deep amber caramel, remove the pan from the heat and turn the nuts out onto the baking sheet., using the wooden spoon to spread them out as best you can. Cool the nuts to room temperature.When they are cool enough to handle, separate the nuts or break them into small pieces. Divide the nuts in half. Keep half of the nuts whole or in biggish pieces for the filling, and finely chop the other half for the topping.Spread the dulce de leche over the shortbread base and sprinkle over the whole candied nuts.

To Make the Topping:
Melt the chocolate in a heatproof bowl set over a saucepan of barely simmering water. Remove chocolate from the heat and gently stir in the butter, stirring until it is fully blended into the chocolate.Pour the chocolate over the dulce de leche, smoothing it with a long metal icing spatula, then sprinkle over the rest of the peanuts. Slide the pan into the fridge to set the topping, about 20 minutes; if you’d like to serve the squares cold, keep them refrigerated for at least 3 hours before cutting.
Cut into 16 bars.

Chocolate Chip Cookies by Bobby Flay

I warned you.

Yes, more chocolate chip cookies. This time brought to you courtesy of Bobby Flay.

Look at him

So cute and boyish. With his freckles and red hair.
I'm not sure what it is about him. I'm generally not attracted to pasty dudes, but there is something so all-american about him. Whenever I see him on television, I watch him. And the other day I caught the tail end of his show Throwdown (it's a show where he challenges cooks/bakers/chefs in a little contest) and this episode was Chocolate Chip Cookies.

Now, by this point, everyone is well aware of my recent chocolate chip cookie obsession. What is it???? I have no idea. But, it's like I can't get enough of chocolate chip cookies. I dream about them, I obsess over them, I seek out new recipes. So, when I saw this episode, I knew it was only a matter of time that I'd be making chocolate chip cookies again.

Little did I know it would be like 2 days later.

Anyway, the thing that struck me the most from the episode was everyone said that Bobby's were very buttery. This caught my attention. I loves me some butter.

These cookies were very buttery! And delicious! But, as I've noticed with all chocolate chip cookies, they could use a little chill time in the fridge before they go into the oven. I'll try that next time and hopefully they won't spread so much. Even with the spreading though, they still tasted chewy and oh so buttery. Yum. Incidentally, his cookies didn't win the throwdown, but the other cookies looked too cakey for me. I have some copycat recipes for the cookies that won, that I will eventually try and then I can do my own little throwdown experiment.

Bobby Flay's Chocolate Chip Cookie

White Chocolate Chip & Peanut Butter Cookies

I spared you all. I really did. Last night I decided to bake something sweet, because I hadn't baked anything since last Thursday night (a long drought for me) and more than anything, I wanted chocolate chip cookies. It's a phase , apparently. I'm blaming Anna at Cookie Madness for re-sparking my interest with her multiple Chocolate Chip Experiments this week.

But, instead of the standard chocolate chip recipe, I pulled out the 500 Cookies cookbook and tried a recipe I had bookmarked in it. Originally the recipe was for Orange and White Chocolate Chip Cookies. Which, sounds good to me most of the time. But I wanted something richer, something less dainty than orange and white chocolate. So, I opted for the variation recipe of substituting peanut butter for orange zest.

The combination of white chocolate and peanut butter is something that has intrigued me recently. So, I was excited to try these cookies. I did notice that this cookie was listed in the "tea-time" section and I briefly thought... that's not just nice cookbooky talk for "dry and tasteless" is it? But, I decided to try it out anyway.

I'm a cookie dough girl. Anytime I make cookies (or brownies), I eat about 3-4 cookies worth of raw cookie dough. I love the stuff. Usually, by the time the cookies actually come out of the oven, I'm already sick of them from nibbling on the dough. So, I had my doubts about these cookies when when I tasted the dough. It was bland and not very buttery.

The first batch, I used white chocolate chips and peanut butter chips. But they turned out too bland, so I threw some semi-sweet chocolate chips in the last batch. The semi-sweet chocolate helped a little, but still these cookies were pretty boring and definitely dry. I tried spicing them up a bit by melting some hershey kisses and icing some of the cookies with that. But, I found myself just licking the chocolate off the top of the cookies, instead of eating the cookies.

Oh well, at least I only made a half batch. But be forewarned... more chocolate chip cookie recipes are on the horizon.


We had some snow this week!! Check it out!!!

S'mores Bars

So, I’ve been eyeing this recipe for awhile now. I saw it a long time ago on Anna's Blog and I printed the recipe awaiting the perfect time to whip these up.

Unfortunately, it took about 6 months for the perfect time to roll around. I made them Thursday night to take to the Bachelorette Weekend honoring my friend Leigh. Who doesn’t love s’mores?

A funny story about this recipe from this weekend... Everyone who knows me… knows about my blogs. But, most of the girls that were at the bachelorette weekend, I either didn’t know at all, or just barely knew. So, on Saturday night, when I passed my camera over to a couple of the girls so they could review the pics from the weekend, I didn’t even think about the 40+ pictures of the s’mores bars that I had taken Friday morning that were still on my camera. That is until I noticed them surfing through the pics and then looking at each other funny, giggling and whispering to each other.

Crap, I thought. Now, they are going to think I have some weird food fetish or something. So, I tried to yell over the loud music at the bar… “I HAVE A BAKING BLOG, THOSE PICTURES ARE FOR MY BLOG, I’M NOT INTO FOOD PORNOGRAPHY.” Which, I think probably made me sound even weirder.

Whatever. They were excellent and the perfect pot luck crowd pleaser. They will definitely be made again.

Here’s the recipe . I doubled it to make a 9x13 inch pan.

I do have one suggestion. Line your baking dish with parchment paper or quick release foil, so that you can remove the bars by the parchment paper or foil and then cut them into squares. Also, I refrigerated the bars overnight before I cut them.

So much easier than building a campfire.

Supernatural Brownies

I have a bad habit. Whenever I find a recipe for something that I like, I generally feel like I don't want to try any other recipes. Like, other recipes aren't going to be better, right? Well, this is something that I definitely need to get over. As made apparent to me by these brownies.

I saw this recipe on Jennifer's Blog and immediately printed the recipe out. But, it's been sitting in my recipe folder since then. For whatever reason, I don't bake brownies that often. Probably because I know how dangerously tempting they are.

This weekend I'm heading to Isle of Palms, SC for my friend Leigh's Bachelorette Weekend Extravaganza. I volunteered to bring baked goodies and I thought some brownies would be the perfect goody, since they travel well (we're talking a 9 hour drive, folks). I went through my recipe folder and picked this recipe and thought... hmmm.. "well I have all the ingredients.. maybe they'll be okay."

Holy crap!!!!! These brownies are delicious! I mean seriously. Moist and fudgy and chewy all at the same time! And incredibly simple to make!! (I just zap my chocolate and butter in the microwave, instead of using the double boiler method).

I baked them in a glass 9x13 inch pan that I had laid a piece of parchment paper in (so that I could lift the brownies out of the pan and cut them easily) for about 40 minutes, but I started checking at 35 minutes. Nobody likes an overcooked brownie, right? After I let them cool on a wire rack, I pulled them out of the pan by the parchment paper and trimmed all the edges off. Nobody likes to see the edges, right? (Okay, I'm totally lying, I don't cut the edges off for aesthetic reasons, I actually cut the edges off, because that's my favorite part and so I gobble that up immediately and just use the excuse... ohhhh the edges are so ugly and you just can't serve brownies with an ugly edge! It's a good thing that I don't own this pan).

Now I understand the title of these brownies... They certainly are Supernatural! I can't wait to serve them this weekend!

Tuesdays with Dorie: Almost Fudge Gateau

It's kind of weird when you can't pronounce the name of what you've cooked. I found myself telling people about this cake and I had to always spell the Gateau part. I knew I should have taken french instead of Latin. Dumb dead language.

Anyway, this cake came together like a dream! There was lots of folding involved in mixing the batter, but I found it kind of soothing in a strange, OCD type of way. For my first Tuesdays with Dorie post, it was awesome!

One thing though... I don't like bittersweet chocolate. I don't really care for any dark chocolate to be honest with you. I know, milk chocolate is like the ugly red headed step child of the chocolate world. But, I can't help it. It's sweet and creamy and delicious. Blame it on my mom. All the sweets we had in the house were made from milk chocolate.

So, I didn't really care for the flavor of the cake. I used some semi-sweet chocolate in the glaze, hoping to sweeten it up a bit, but it was still pretty bitter. The texture of this cake is amazing though! So, if you love bittersweet chocolate, this is the cake for you! And you can come over anytime in the next 2 months and I'll defrost a piece for you!

When I originally started this blog, I wanted to incorporate the music that I listened to while I baked, but for whatever reason, I bailed on that part. So, I'm going to make it apart of my Tuesdays with Dorie Posts.

This cake was made while listening to Holopaw's self-titled album: Holopaw. (Which is fitting, because I actually don't know how to pronounce Holopaw either).

Enjoy!

Chosen by Nikki of Crazy Delicious

Almost-Fudge Gâteau
5 large eggs
9 ounces bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1 cup of sugar
5 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into chunks
2 tablespoons coffee or water
1/3 cup all-purpose flour
Pinch of salt

For the Glaze (optional)
4 ounces bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
½ cup heavy cream
2 teaspoons light corn syrup

Getting Ready:
Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter a 9-inch springform pan, line the bottom with parchment paper, butter the paper, dust the inside of the pan with flour and tap out the excess. Place the pan on a baking sheet lined with parchment or a silicone mat.

Separate the eggs, putting the whites in a mixer bowl or other large bowl and the yolks in a small bowl.

Set a heatproof bowl over a saucepan of simmering water and add the chocolate, sugar butter and coffee. Stir occasionally until the chocolate and butter are melted; the sugar may still be grainy, and that's fine. Transfer the bowl to the counter and let the mixture sit for 3 minutes.

Using a rubber spatula, stir in the yolks one by one, then fold in the flour.
Working with the whisk attachment of the mixer or a hand mixer, beat the egg whites with the pinch of salt until they hold firm, but glossy peaks. Using the spatula, stir about one quarter of the beaten whites into the batter, then gently fold in the rest. Scrape the butter into the pan and jiggle the pan from side to side a couple of times to even the batter.

Bake for 35 to 45 minutes, or until the cake has risen evenly (it might rise around the edges and you'll think it's done, but give it a few minutes more, and the center will puff too) and the top has firmed (it will probably be cracked) and doesn't shimmy when tapped; a thin knife inserted into the center should come out just slightly streaked with chocolate. Transfer the pan to a cooling rack and let the cake rest for 5 to 10 minutes.

Run a blunt knife gently around the edges of the cake and remove the sides of the pan. Carefully turn the cake over onto a rack and remove the pan bottom and the parchment paper. Invert the cake onto another rack and cool to room temperature right side up. As the cake cools, it may sink.

To Make the Optional Glaze:

First, turn the cooled cake over onto another rack so you'll be glazing the flat bottom, and place the rack over a baking sheet lined with parchment or wax paper to catch any drips.

Put the chocolate in a small heatproof bowl.

Melt the chocolate over a pan of simmering water or in a microwave oven – the chocolate should be just melted and only warm, not hot. Meanwhile, bring the cream to a boil in a small sauce pan. Pour the hot cream over the chocolate and stir very gently with a rubber spatula until the mixture is smooth and shiny. Stir in the corn syrup.

Pour the glaze over the cake and smooth the top with a long metal icing spatula. Don't worry if the glaze drips unevenly down the sides of the cake – it will just add to its charms. Allow the glaze to set at room temperature or, if you're impatient, slip the cake into the refrigerator for about 20 minutes. If the glaze dulls in the fridge, just give it a little gentle heat from a hairdryer.

Chocolate Chip Cookies, again.

I dont know what it is. But, I think it's safe to say that it's officially an obsession right now.

Yes, I made chocolate chip cookies again! This is the 2nd time this week and like the 4th time in two weeks. I know, I know, you're sick of chocolate chip cookies (surprisingly, I'm not), but I just had to test my favorite recipe with a little adaptation. I substituted a couple of the tbsps of butter for butter flavored shortening. Hoping that that would make the cookies less crispy on top. But, only just slightly. It didn't make the cookies softer, but the cookies did seem to have a little something extra in them. But, I can't put my finger on it.

Why mess with a good thing? Because, I want them to be perfect. And they are close, but they aren't quite there yet. I think I might try this ratio again, but I might actually add more butter to the recipe. Maybe I'll spare you blog readers with that experimentation.

Anyway, here's the recipe.

My notes:

-- I halved the recipe
-- I substituted 2 tbsp of butter for 2 tbsp butter flavored shortening.
-- I always chill the dough for at least 30 minutes before I bake them. (Have I mentioned that before?)