Last December when I was planning out the menu for our annual holiday party, one of the items that was on my list of possible desserts was Flo Braker's Butterscotch-Glazed Coffee Shortbread Bars. I own a couple of Braker's cookbooks and have a high opinion of her recipes; plus, the bars can be stored for a week, so they would have been a good choice for our holiday party because I have to make a lot of things in advance. The bars got dropped from the party menu, but I finally got around to making them last week.
The base layer is a shortbread made from butter, sugar, vanilla, salt, flour, and ground espresso beans (I used regular ground coffee). You press the dough into a pan, bake, and cut the shortbread into bars while it's still warm. After the cut bars are cool, you pour on a butterscotch glaze made from butter, brown sugar, espresso, corn syrup, and salt. The glaze set rather quickly, so I had to work quickly to spread it into a thin layer that covered all of the bars.
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I am now kicking myself for waiting so long to make these bars, because they are delicious! The shortbread is rich and buttery with a beautiful coffee flavor that isn't harsh or overpowering in any way. The butterscotch glaze is deeply flavorful, sweet, and smooth; the combination of the shortbread and glaze is sublime.
My only complaint is that the glaze remained sticky even after I let it set, so I couldn't stack the bars for storage (I tried separating the bars with sheets of wax paper, but the glaze stuck to the paper). This minor detail means that these bars will probably never make an appearance at our holiday party, because there would be no convenient and efficient way to store a large quantity of them. But fortunately that's not an obstacle to savoring this scrumptious shortbread all year round, one delectable batch at a time!
Recipe: "Butterscotch-Glazed Coffee Shortbread Bars" from Flo Braker, available at foodandwine.com.
The base layer is a shortbread made from butter, sugar, vanilla, salt, flour, and ground espresso beans (I used regular ground coffee). You press the dough into a pan, bake, and cut the shortbread into bars while it's still warm. After the cut bars are cool, you pour on a butterscotch glaze made from butter, brown sugar, espresso, corn syrup, and salt. The glaze set rather quickly, so I had to work quickly to spread it into a thin layer that covered all of the bars.
.JPG)
My only complaint is that the glaze remained sticky even after I let it set, so I couldn't stack the bars for storage (I tried separating the bars with sheets of wax paper, but the glaze stuck to the paper). This minor detail means that these bars will probably never make an appearance at our holiday party, because there would be no convenient and efficient way to store a large quantity of them. But fortunately that's not an obstacle to savoring this scrumptious shortbread all year round, one delectable batch at a time!
Recipe: "Butterscotch-Glazed Coffee Shortbread Bars" from Flo Braker, available at foodandwine.com.
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