52 Weeks of Baking week 6 (4 for me)

I baked a bunch of cookies again this time my sons school bake sale in conjunction with the rummage sale and a cookies exchange here on Swap-Bot.
I like a little challenge and my swap partner wrote that she loves bar style cookies. My attempt at a bar cookie years go resulted on burned edges and uncooked middle. So I decided that I would try again.

I looked at all the recipes I had in my specialty cookie books and they all required refrigeration for storage and that would not work for either the bake sale or sending the cookies out. I finally grabbed my Better Homes and Garden book and found 2 recipes for bar cookies that seemed to fit the bill.

The first I made was a simple bar, called Terrific Toffee bars, I omitted the nuts as the school requests that all baked goods be nut free. Personally I think the nuts would have distracted from the toffee flavor.  I found the recipe quick easy and painless. I made the spreading of the chocolate chips easier by putting it in the warm oven for 30 seconds. The toffee bits I used were pre-broken heath bars that I found next to the chocolate chips at my local grocery store.

I found the bars that I made following the recipe closely were tasty but thin. I wanted something a little thicker. I decided to make another batch this time in a smaller pan. I also added ½ cup of chocolate chips to the dough. The resulted in a chewer and thicker bar but with little taste difference. The bars were interchangeable really.

Next up was the oatmeal bars I wanted to make something fruity. I had a vision of a blueberry cookie bar. What I found was a recipe called Fruit Filled Oatmeal Bars. I have attached a copy of that one as well. It gave me four filling options I first chose to do the raisin filling using regular raisins instead of golden raisins. I found it quite tasty but I felt that not having a pastry blender was hard to work.

After some thought I decided to employ my pastry method for the second batch. I put the ingredients, except the oatmeal, for the oatmeal layer to my food processor and pulsed it until it began to resemble crumbs. I then added the oatmeal pulsed about 5 more times until it was well combined but not ground. I then followed the rest of the written directions. For this second batch I wanted to make it blueberry and I used dried blueberries and the same method for filling as the raisin filling with half the sugar knowing that dried blueberries are very sweet. This second batch was definitely a better batch although still quite sweet. I probably could use even less sugar next time.

So my swap partner for the cookie exchange has already gotten the package (so nice when she is only one state away) and loved them all saying that the toffee were her favorite. I watched all my bars get sold at the bake sale on Saturday and the few left for my family are gone. My kids would not eat them My husband liked them all but said that the toffee was his favorite as well.