Friday, April 4, 2014

Chocolate Not-Chip Cookie Bars

Cookies: Success!
So, I kind of fell in love with the silicone bark molds from Good Cook.

At Christmas, I used the Christmas-themed ones to make cashew brittle, peanut brittle, and peanut butter shale candy.

Then, I got the spring-themed mold and made polenta.

Yup, it's not just for sweets. I was thinking about making a frittata as well, but changed my mind.

I wanted cookies.

My first try was fair, but not great. Not the fault of the mold. The cookies were edible, but not blog-worthy.

Then I started thinking about chocolate chip cookies. I mean, you can bake those as bars, so why not use the mold?

Then I thought about taking the chips out of the cookies and using the chocolate a different way.

So, I started with the basic Toll House Cookie recipe that's on the back of every bag. But I left out the chocolate chips. And I didn't add nuts.

Here's the spring bark mold from Good Cook.
I suppose I could have added the nuts to the batter, but ... well, I just didn't. Which is crazy because I love nuts.

Birds of a feather, and all that stuff.

I baked the whole batch of cookie dough in the mold. All went well, except that there was a little bit of run-over as the cookie dough rose a little too far and spilled over the edges of the pan. I'm not sure if that would happen at sea level, but here at high altitude, sometimes baked goods have attitude.

But no big deal. While the dough was warm, I sliced off the extra. And, well, I ATE those pieces. Have you ever baked a chocolate chip cookie without the chips? They're a pretty good cookie. And those slightly-overcooked bits that I cut off were crisp and had a wonderful caramel flavor. Oh yeah. That's a snack!

If you're planning on doing this, you might consider not filling the mold as full as I did. Bake a few cookies. That way, you're sure it won't overflow the pan. It wouldn't hurt for them to be a little bit thinner than what I made. I mean, you can always just do what I did and cut off the overflow, but you could also just bake a few cookies and hide those for yourself, too.

So I let the baked, trimmed cookies cool completely in the pan, then turned the whole thing out onto a cooling rack for holding. I didn't care about the design baked into the cookies - the only reason I baked them in the mold was so I could put them back into the mold after I added the chocolate.

I melted 2 cups of chocolate chips and spread that evenly in the pan, then I put the baked, cooled cookie-bar thing back on top of the chocolate.

I let that sit around for a couple hours to make sure the chocolate had hardened, then I popped it out of the mold, cut the bars into pieces, and that was that.

Easy peasy.

Although the chocolate-to-cookie ratio is the same as you'd get in a regular chocolate chip cookie, since the chocolate is in a thick layer it seems like a much bigger punch of chocolate. Whether or not you think that's a good thing is totally up to you.

If you wanted to, you could use a bit less chocolate. But who's gonna do that, huh?

If you want to get a spring bark mold of your own, or any of the other Sweet Creations spring cooking tools, you can get 25% your order with the promo code SpringFling.

I received the bark mold and spatula as part of the Kitchen Experts program. This post was not required. I just wanted cookies.




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