TWD: Caramel Crunch Bars

This week Tuesdays With Dorie finished off a great month of baking with Caramel Crunch Bars. I was excited that this recipe contained one of my old favorite baking treats, toffee bits, which I had somehow forgotten about. I used to cut up Heath or Skor bars and put them in a basic chocolate chip cookie dough recipe instead of chocolate chips. The cookies were always a big hit; I don’t know why I stopped making them. This recipe was a great reminder.



The recipe called for the bars to be baked in a 9x13” pan, but when I read the Problems & Questions on the TWD site, other bakers said they would recommend a smaller pan, so I used an 8x8” and a 4” springform pan. I think a 9x9” pan probably would have been ideal, but the person I share a kitchen with thinks I already own plenty of baking pans, so I’m trying to make do with what I have. I didn’t put as much chocolate in the dough as the recipe called for, since there was so much chocolate on the top layer and the Heath bits had chocolate as well. The book suggests making ice cream sandwiches with these bars, so I made Salted Butter Caramel Ice Cream to accompany the bars – they never quite made it into sandwich form.



I asked Mr. Penpen what he thought this recipe should rate for Deliciousness, and he gave it a 9. I had been thinking more like a 7 (a little too sweet for me), so its official D score will be 8. I gave this surprisingly easy recipe a 3 for Effort - for some reason I thought more layers would equal more work, giving it an EDR of 2.33. If I took the ice cream into account, the E score would definitely be higher.



Many thanks to Whitney of What’s Left on the Table for selecting these yummy bars. You can find the recipe for the bars on Whitney’s site, and if you can find the recipe for the ice cream on David Lebovitz’s site.