S’mores Cookie Bars

After the last s’more cookie fail, I figured I needed to give it another shot. I had a few people send me a link to this s’more cookie bar idea off of pinterest, so that was this week’s sunday night baking experiment. I didn’t actually read the recipe before I went grocery shopping tonight so I had to improvise a little bit, but I can happily say this time the s’mores were not an epic fail. I still am not a huge fan of fluff, so if I did this again, I think I would probably make the fluff from scratch, but I was not feeling adventurous tonight.

Ingredients:

  • 1/2 cup butter, room temperature
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup sugar
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 tsp vanilla extract
  • 1 1/3 cups all purpose flour
  • 1 cup graham cracker crumbs
  • 1 tsp baking powder
  • 1/4 tsp salt
  • 1 1/2 cups of chocolate chips (If you have it, it would be better to use 2 king-sized milk chocolate bars)
  • 1 1/2 cups marshmallow fluff
Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Cream together butter and sugar. Then mix in the egg and vanilla. I feel like these first steps look the same in every recipe, so I’m trying to find new ways to photograph it one handed.
Step 2: If you did not buy graham cracker crumbs, ground up about 4 whole graham crackers in a food processor until fine.
Step 3: In a separate bowl, mix together flour, graham cracker crumbs, baking powder (woops, I used baking soda), and salt. I don’t know what’s wrong with me tonight, just impatient and not reading directions. Mix that into the wet ingredients.
Step 4: Separate the dough into two halves.
Step 5: Press half of the dough in an even layer on the bottom of a greased 8×8 baking pan. And yes, that’s a new spring color manicure .
Step 6: Place chocolate bars over the dough. I didnt have chocolate bars, so I used chocolate chips.
Step 7: Spread a later of marshmallow fluff on top of the chocolate. This is not easy to spread, especially on tiny chocolate chips, so now I understand why I should have used chocolate bars. oh well.  I didnt have enough fluff either, but I just used what I had, which I think was a little over a cup.
Step 8: Place the remaining dough in a single layer on top of the fluff. This is also tricky, so i put small chunks of the dough flattened and then press them together.
Step 9: Bake for 30-35 minutes until lightly browned. Let them cool completely before cutting into them.
Of course I was impatient and already cut into one. Definitely a success. I think it’s going to be a dash for cookie desk tomorrow because even cutting these small, I dont think it is going to make more than 20. I’m always up for a new cookie challenge, so keep the ideas coming and cross your fingers to make Monday’s cookie list this week!

S’more Cookie Experiment Fail

If every cookie experiment turned out well, it wouldn’t be called experimenting it could be called being perfect. Tonight’s S’more cookie experiment is what we like to call an epic fail.

I worked from home this afternoon because the lovely city of Boston has this new fun thing where it doesn’t think we need power to do our jobs … so after another mini-blackout in the office, I opted for sweatpants and internet on my couch to finish the workday. But being 5 feet from my kitchen all day, I couldn’t help but try to figure out what my next cookie experiment would be. So I went to the grocery store tonight and picked up a few random things: graham cracker crumbs, peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, regular marshmallows, flat marshmallows and baking soda. I couldn’t figure out if I was in a peanut butter mood or something very different. I had seen a bunch of S’more cookie variations on Pinterest earlier today. This one looked interesting (http://www.mybakingaddiction.com/giant-smores-cookies/) but I thought I would make my own variation …. not a good idea.

I’m not even going to post the full recipe because I wouldn’t recommend making it. I loosely went off of this recipe for chewy graham cookies as the base (http://www.mykitchenaddiction.com/2011/06/chewy-graham-cookies/). Good thing Tuesday night is trash tonight because these will not be making their way into the office tomorrow morning.  I have some tough critics there and these cookies just won’t cut it for them. Way too sugary sweet, and chewy sticky from the marshmallows.

They looked good going into the oven:

They didn’t look horrible coming out of the oven … but they were one hot sticky mess.

Getting them off of the tray onto the parchment to cool …. did not go well either. And while I think my coworkers wouldn’t mind cookies that aren’t formed perfectly … they were way too sugary and the graham added a weird flavor to the mixture that just wasn’t up to The Salted Cookie’s standards. You live you learn … on to the next one.