Czech, Please!: Czechoslovakian Nut Bars

I'll admit that I can be a bit of a snob when I bake -- I like taking on complicated projects, and I'm often looking for desserts with a "wow" factor. So sometimes I overlook simpler recipes. But I recently tried a great one that was a winner from the 2013 Los Angeles Times Holiday Cookie Bakeoff: Czechoslovakian Nut Bars.

There are only seven ingredients in these bars: butter, sugar, egg yolks, flour, salt, walnuts, and raspberry jam. You divide the dough into two parts and put half of it into a parchment-lined pan (the recipe says to pat the dough into the pan, but my dough was soft enough that I could use an offset spatula to spread it into an even layer). You add a layer of raspberry jam, and then drop small pieces of the remaining dough over the jam. That's it, and the bars are ready to bake.

While there were a few exposed spots of jam before I put the bars in the oven, the dough expanded during baking to cover all of them (except for the little blobs of jam that seeped out at the edges, as you can see in the photo above). These bars might not look like anything special, but they were so good! They were decadently buttery, with a tender melt-in-your-mouth texture. And the walnuts and raspberry jam were flavorful and delicious.

In light of this recipe's L.A. Times holiday bakeoff credentials, I was optimistic that the bars would turn out well. They were even better that I had hoped!  

Recipe: "Czechoslovakian Nut Bars" by Mary Martin, printed in the December 20, 2013 Los Angeles Times.