Cookies Are Good. Bars are GREAT.
When I was dealing with health issues and needed to cut out certain foods* the first thing I did was find dessert recipes that fit into my new dietary guidelines** . Through various Googling and Pinteresting I found Texan Erin, a recipe site that’s truly remarkable. Every (and I mean EVERY) recipe I have made of hers has not just been good, it’s been AMAZING. My favorite is her Perfect Paleo Chocolate Chip Cookies. This is the thing I bring any time I need to bring a thing. I get requests to make these cookies, and because I love baking, I always oblige. Apparently, I’m not the only one obsessed with this recipe. Erin herself posted that this is her most popular recipe and she even updated the original post with some tips and tricks. I’ve made these cookies so many times I’ve memorized the recipe, but one of the tricks she mentioned was baking the dough into bars instead of cookies. I had to try it immediately.
Erin recommended using an 8”x8” baking pan, and luckily I had one. I made a little parchment paper nest (this must have a real name, but I don’t know what it is) and plopped my chilled dough in. It… didn’t look great. The dough needs to be chilled for about an hour before baking, and even if it wasn’t fridge-cold, I don’t think it would have spread easily into a pan. I tried using a spatula to smooth it out and into all the corners, but it didn’t really work. So I scrubbed my hands and used them. It was weird and worked great.
Once the dough is evenly spread, it looks much more like this plan is actually going to work out. The suggested baking time was “check after 15 minutes,” and it turned out that was just right. I knew from making the cookies so many times that right out of the oven they are VERY soft and you need to let them cool entirely on the baking sheets, so I took out the pan and just let it hang out on the counter for about an hour.
The bars looked like bars! And they had that perfect crisp edge that is my personal favorite piece. I cut them into 16 pieces and somehow didn’t take a photo of a single one. I will say that as I cut through, I was worried the bars were raw in the middle, but it turns out that I was just cutting through chocolate chips and they smeared along the side, making it seem uncooked. I bravely took a bite and they tasted exactly like the cookies, except in bar form, and with so many pieces with that great crispy edge.
When I was a kid and my mom needed to take brownies to some event, she’d cut the edges off so they all looked even (this is a great presentation hack, BTW) which would leave US at home with ALL EDGES and it was truly heavenly. Dip them in frosting. AMAZING.
This is a great hack for when you want to make smaller portions, fit them in a smaller container, feed a larger group, or you just want to have some corner pieces (THE BEST PART). This recipe makes eight LARGE cookies, but sometimes you don’t want a huge cookie, or you don’t want to mess around with breaking a cookie in half and then it’s never a perfect half so you’re really eating 3/4 of a cookie and then 1/4 of a cookie and…. listen: I’m going to be making a lot of cookie bars from here on out.
* This is often something people with chronic illness explore, and it’s almost never helpful. In fact, I’m now a believer that food restriction, when not completely necessary, is BAD and should NOT be done. I could talk about this forever, but I’ll spare you. Except to say: Food restriction for vague health reasons IS diet culture and that is NOT GOOD.
**Seriously, this is NOT GOOD. I recommend listening to the Food Psych podcast to hear more about this from a professional and not someone who has a visceral reaction to people talking about how foods cause inflammation (i.e., they don’t, and inflammation isn’t bad!)
