Last night I tried Nancy Baggett's recipe for Turtle Bars from The All-American Cookie Book -- a candylike confection of a cookie crust that is topped with a layer of caramel with pecans, covered with a layer of chocolate, and finished with more pecans.
You make the crust for these bars by cutting cold butter in to a mixture of flour, sugar, and salt, and then adding a bit of milk to make a dough just damp enough to stick together. The crust mixture is pressed into a pan, chilled, and blind baked. My crust visibly shrank from the edges of the pan during baking, but it did stay nice and flat. You make the pecan-caramel layer by cooking heavy cream, corn syrup, butter, brown sugar, sugar, and salt to 246 degrees, and then stirring in vanilla and toasted chopped pecans. After you spread the caramel onto the crust, you immediately scatter over a bag of chocolate chips, which melt on the hot caramel. You then spread the melted chocolate over the top of the bars and sprinkle on more pecans.
The recipe instructs you to refrigerate the bars until they are completely cooled before cutting them into bars. Since I made these late in the evening, I left the finished pan in the refrigerator overnight and then tried to slice them right before leaving for work this morning. I found that the cold caramel layer was extremely brittle, and the bars were splintering off into irregular shards as I was trying to cut them into neat squares. The photo above shows one of the few squarish bars I managed to cut, but you can see that the bottom crust border is quite uneven; the crust fractured when the caramel above it broke off as I tried to cut into it. I learned later in the day that the caramel actually becomes soft and chewy once it comes back to room temperature; I think if I had just let the bars warm up a bit before I cut them, I wouldn't have had a problem.
As for the taste, I have never been a fan of caramel turtles and I didn't think these bars were anything special. In particular, I was disappointed by the crust component, which seemed to be virtually flavorless and didn't even contribute that much in the way of texture. However, people seemed to enjoy these quite a bit, and if you are a fan of caramel and pecans, these treats might be right up your alley.
Recipe: "Turtle Bars" from The All-American Cookie Book by Nancy Baggett.
You make the crust for these bars by cutting cold butter in to a mixture of flour, sugar, and salt, and then adding a bit of milk to make a dough just damp enough to stick together. The crust mixture is pressed into a pan, chilled, and blind baked. My crust visibly shrank from the edges of the pan during baking, but it did stay nice and flat. You make the pecan-caramel layer by cooking heavy cream, corn syrup, butter, brown sugar, sugar, and salt to 246 degrees, and then stirring in vanilla and toasted chopped pecans. After you spread the caramel onto the crust, you immediately scatter over a bag of chocolate chips, which melt on the hot caramel. You then spread the melted chocolate over the top of the bars and sprinkle on more pecans.
The recipe instructs you to refrigerate the bars until they are completely cooled before cutting them into bars. Since I made these late in the evening, I left the finished pan in the refrigerator overnight and then tried to slice them right before leaving for work this morning. I found that the cold caramel layer was extremely brittle, and the bars were splintering off into irregular shards as I was trying to cut them into neat squares. The photo above shows one of the few squarish bars I managed to cut, but you can see that the bottom crust border is quite uneven; the crust fractured when the caramel above it broke off as I tried to cut into it. I learned later in the day that the caramel actually becomes soft and chewy once it comes back to room temperature; I think if I had just let the bars warm up a bit before I cut them, I wouldn't have had a problem.As for the taste, I have never been a fan of caramel turtles and I didn't think these bars were anything special. In particular, I was disappointed by the crust component, which seemed to be virtually flavorless and didn't even contribute that much in the way of texture. However, people seemed to enjoy these quite a bit, and if you are a fan of caramel and pecans, these treats might be right up your alley.
Recipe: "Turtle Bars" from The All-American Cookie Book by Nancy Baggett.
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