Crunchy, Gooey and Chocolatey–Toffee Bar Cookies

A crunchy crust, a gooey caramel layer and a ganache topping--the perfect toffee bar at last.

By Laurie A. Perry
I’ve been making toffee bars since I was nine years old–but not the same toffee bar. I’ve tried a dozen recipes by that name, and I started numbering the ones I liked enough to make twice. Toffee bar number one had coconut and brown sugar. Toffee bar number two had a brown sugar and butter crust and a topping of melted Hershey’s milk chocolate (milk chocolate–no wonder that one fell by the wayside). Number three, from an ancient Better Homes and Gardens cookie cookbook, calls for a sweetened condensed milk filling and a fudge frosting. I liked it–and Mel really liked it–but it never quite worked.

So I’ve been tinkering with the recipe, and I think the current version is pretty darn good. Try it; see what you think. I’m taking a batch to a New Year’s Day gathering. Because, you know, there just aren’t enough sweets this time of year.

GANACHE-TOPPED TOFFEE BARS

Crust
2 cups flour
1 cup melted butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla

Filling
1 can sweetened condensed milk
2 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons vanilla

Ganache topping
8 ounces bittersweet chocolate
1 cup cream

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Line a 9×11-inch baking pan with foil.*
Make the crust: stir together the dry ingredients. Melt the butter; add the vanilla to the butter, and mix both into the dry ingredients. Pat the mixture into the prepared pan; it will be soft and easy to spread out. Bake for about 20 minutes, until lightly browned.
While the crust is baking, make the filling. Pour the sweetened condensed milk into a medium saucepan, add the butter and bring to a simmer. Simmer for about five minutes, stirring to keep it from burning. The mixture will thicken. Add the vanilla.

Pour the filling over the baked crust, making sure to cover all of the crust. Bake for another 20 minutes. It will bubble and turn a lovely golden brown (toffee-colored, in fact).
Remove from the oven and let cool for about half an hour. Make the ganache: break up the bittersweet chocolate and place in a heavy-bottomed saucepan; pour in the cream, and put the pan over low heat. Melt the chocolate, stirring. When the mixture is nice and smooth and glossy, it’s ready to pour gently over the first two layers. Once again, go for coverage–you want the ganache to cover the entire surface.

Chill. Remove the confection from the pan, using the overhanging foil as a handle. Cut into bars. These are rich, so don’t make the pieces too large.

*Maida Heatter’s fool-proof method for lining a pan with aluminum foil: Turn the pan upside down. Tear off a large piece of foil and press it over the pan, so you have the basic shape. Then press the foil into the pan, using a dish towel to keep the foil from tearing.

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Cream Cheese Pumpkin Bars

Perfect for Halloween. Or Thanksgiving. Nut-topped pumpkin bars are luscious and so easy to make.

Are you surprised? Once again, we bring you a dessert that will never be recommended by the American Heart Association. But these pumpkin bars are perfect for Halloween parties, and I’m making dozens of them for my sister Allis’s housewarming Halloween bash. (I also made bunches of them for a recent Molly’s Mutts & Meows fundraiser.)

The original version of this bar cookie used a spice cake mix as the base. Just between you and me, I thought it was disgusting. So I replaced it with the world’s easiest bar cookie base, created by Alice Medrich and published in her wonderful book Pure Dessert, as the base for the best lemon bars ever. The topping does have one healthy item in it: pumpkin. The rest of it–cream cheese, sweetened condensed milk, eggs… Well, I suggest when people ask what’s in them, you just mention the pumpkin.

Here’s the recipe.

Cream Cheese Pumpkin Bars

This makes a 9×13-inch panful, and it is made in two stages: first you bake the base, then the filling with the base. Total baking time is about an hour.

The base:
2 sticks of butter
1/2 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups all-purpose flour

The filling:

8 ounces cream cheese, softened
14 oz. can of sweetened condensed milk
16 oz. can pumpkin
2 teaspoons pumpkin pie spice (or 1 teaspoon cinnamon, 1/4 teaspoon cloves, 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, 1/2 teaspoon ginger)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 eggs
1 cup chopped walnut or pecans

Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Stir together the sugar, salt and flour. Melt the butter and pour it into the flour mixture; add the vanilla. Stir it together and dump it into the pan and pat it out to the edges. (Notice the elegant simplicity of this approach: no hauling out the food processor and cutting up cold butter and whirring it together with the dry ingredients and then pressing the crumbs into the pan. This is easy.) Bake it for about 25 minutes, until it’s well browned at the edges and golden in the middle.

In the meantime, make the filling. Beat the cream cheese until it’s fluffy, then pour in the milk and beat again. Add the eggs, pumpkin, spices and salt. Mix well. Pour over the baked crust and sprinkle nuts over the top. Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, until set. Cool and then refrigerate.

However, I think these bars are delicious warm, and I dig right in as soon I think they’ve cooled off enough that I won’t burn my mouth too badly.

For parties, I cut the bars about an inch square and put each one in a cupcake paper. There are lots of cute and seasonal cupcake papers around; I’m using black-and-white polka-dot ones for this holiday.

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Recipe for a Party Disaster – What We Have Here Is a Failure to Plan

It’s Easter and I’m going to someone else’s house this year. I had several yummy options – one for a seder on Saturday night – but I was already booked with my niece and the symphony. And I had several for Sunday too. I chose dinner with my sweetie’s folks; his sis is doing the cooking and I’m contributing dessert and flowers.

I used to cook Easter dinner each year for sisters and friends who didn’t have other family they were committed to going to. You know holidays — if you’re married, with or without kids, there’s always some negotiation about whose family gets which holidays. But Easter would often find me on my own, so for a while, I had a tradition of making Easter dinner for single and unattached friends and relatives, while those with husbands and kids made new traditions.

Anyone who knows me knows that procrastinators call me “your majesty.” I am the queen. I will put off many things for as long as possible. Sometimes it’s because I’m worn out, sometimes work gets in the way, and sometimes I’m just lazy.

I’m always tempted to wait until the last possible moment to shop for a holiday meal. After all, you want to be sure that your veggies are fresh! I say to myself, If I get up really early on H-day, I can beat the crowds and still get everything done. Usually. One year I was working nine hours a day and commuting four hours a day, five days a week; I was exhausted by the time I got home. So I delayed just a wee bit too long to do my Easter grocery shopping. But I wasn’t concerned. I had carefully noted that Lucky Market was open Easter day, so I on Sunday morning I dashed out to go grocery shopping. There was a sign on the door, stating that it would be open Easter day – but it wasn’t. It was no consolation that many others stood outside the un-sliding doors looking as bewildered as I was. We finally drifted off; the other customers were, I’m sure, looking for the one item they hadn’t picked up the day before.

I, however, needed almost a complete dinner. I had acquired a few of the items on my list during the previous week, but the main item, the traditional Easter ham, was sorely missing from my refrigerator, as were dessert and many other essentials. I lived in suburbia; there were many available supermarkets. I drove from closed market to another closed market, each locked door making me more desperate. I had invited a mere six guests, but I’m fairly sure they were expecting to be fed.

I found a Mexican market open and picked up some sad but serviceable veggies, Marie Callendar’s yielded my traditional lemon meringue pie…but still no ham. Finally (just before I had made up my mind to drive to downtown LA (where something must be open for god’s sake) I drove by a liquor store. I ran in to purchase wine (enough wine and my pals will forgive the most egregious of faux pas) and lo! a canned ham. Tiny by any standards but my guest list was too. I bought it, dressed it up with pineapple purchased on my travels, dotted it with cloves as my mom had taught me and threw it on to bake.

That was the last year I baked a ham. My tradition the following year was grilled salmon, asparagus and scalloped potatoes. And it has stayed my Easter meal when I cook. Only now I call it my vernal equinox meal. And I’ve never, ever waited too long to shop since then. I am still known as the queen of Lucy Plans, and I still procrastinate, but some things are too Lucy even for me!

Hazel

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Hello, My Pharaoh!

Here’s the invitation to the seder Mel and I will attend this Saturday. You can see exactly how serious an event it will be–just in case the fact that it will take place long after the first two nights of Passover doesn’t tip you off.

It's an invitation to a Passover seder AND a tribute to Michigan J. Frog.

We will be bringing our own plagues. I was wondering how to represent the plague of blood that befell Egypt–but, thanks to the popularity of Twilight, it was easy. Yes, my local Party City carries a product clearly marked Bottle of Blood. Whew! It’s an ill wind…

Laurie

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The Stores’ My Destination*- How to Plan and Shop for a Thanksgiving Brunch

I used to work with a clever and talented young editor who always said that cooking was easy; shopping was hard. It can be a pain in the backside, true enough. I mean, we’ve all seen the parking lot at Trader Joe’s–any Trader Joe’s. I subscribe to the search-and-destroy approach to shopping. I like to get in and get out. And I start with a list.

For a Thanksgiving weekend brunch, we put together the following menu and posted the recipes:

Mimosas and coffee
Pear and blue cheese salad
Cream cheese-filled croissant french toast
bacon
fresh fruit salad

Chocolate walnut tart

Here’s what you need to buy for that menu:

Grapes for a fruit salad

ready-made appetizer of your choice (or not, also your choice)
orange juice
sparkling wine
coffee
1 quart milk
sugar
one dozen eggs
eight croissants (or one per person)
1 or 2 pounds bacon (or turkey sausage or Morningstar tofu patties, or…)
cherry preserves
16 ounces soft cream cheese
syrup or syrup ingredients (sugar and cinnamon sticks)
powdered sugar if you want to serve it
fresh fruit: grapes, oranges, strawberries, melon (we found all of these at our local farmers market)
walnuts
oakleaf lettuce
2 Bartlett pears
4 ounces Cambozola
walnuts
light-flavored oil, preferably walnut
mild vinegar, preferably champagne but rice vinegar is also fine
salt
pepper

pecans
6 ounces bittersweet chocolate
corn syrup
either a ready-made pie crust or the ingredients to make one: flour and butter

Check it twice. I’m assuming you’ve got serving bowls and baking pans and measuring cups. If not…well, see Hazel’s advice about hitting Ross Dress for Less or Marshalls or your friendly neighborhood thrift shop. Or have a fabulous time at Surfas, Sur la Table, Williams Sonoma…. You know your budget and your ambitions better than we do.

Shop for groceries at least a day before you plan to serve. Trying to do everything the morning of a brunch is the road to madness. Ideally, you have most of your supplies well in advance and can get the house ready the day before, including making a centerpiece.

We’re partial to the many terrific farmers markets here in Los Angeles, and if you share that enthusiasm, you know that

The last of the Bartlett pears at Ha's Apples

you have to schedule your produce shopping around the day of the market. We broke our own rules and dashed off to the Sunday market in Encino (I figured we had time–brunch at 11:30, market opens at 8:00–and I wanted genuinely fresh greens). We were lucky: we found end-of-season fruit–a gorgeous honeydew melon and the last of the Seascape strawberries–as well as grapes and salad greens. And then we dashed home to assemble our salads.

The French toast, however, is best made earlier in the day so it can absorb the egg mixture and transmogrify into something more delicious than the sum of its parts.

*With all due apologies to Alfred Bester and his classic science-fiction novel

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