Adventures in Cooking - Choc Chip Cookie Bars

A few weeks ago we went to a little cafe up in the hills for a lovely brunch. Afterwards, we bought a couple of sweet things to bring home to have later. My choice was a choc chip and walnut cookie bar, that apparently was made with Lindt chocolate. Sounds delicious, right? Wrong. It was the driest, most tasteless thing I've ever eaten in my life. My people, choc chip anything should not be dry and tasteless. EVER.

I started thinking I could make my own version. So I did.

Behold:

Choc Chip Cookie Bars!

Ingredients

125 grams butter (room temperature)

1/2 cup caster sugar

1/2 cup brown sugar, lightly packed

1/2 teaspoon vanilla essence

1 egg

1 3/4 cups self-raising flour

1/2 teaspoon salt

125 grams good quality chocolate chips

50 grams chopped walnuts or hazelnuts (optional)

Total prep and cooking time: about an hour.

Method

Cream together the butter, sugars and vanilla with an electric mixer. Make sure all the butter gets beaten in (at first it will look like little pebbles of butter, but keep beating it until it becomes smooth).

Add the lightly beaten egg.

Mix in the sifted flour, salt and choc chips with a wooden spoon (if you're adding nuts, throw them in now as well).

Mix until the mixture becomes a soft dough that is very slightly moist. Apologies if you don't like the word 'moist.' It appears one more time in this post. Sorry! To make up for that, I will advise you to taste the dough now. It. Is. AMAZING.

Grease a square brownie/cake tin and line the base of it with baking paper. The one I used was 23cm x 23xm. Pour the mixture into the tin and use a large metal tablespoon to spread it out evenly. smooth the top as much as you can (coating the back of the spoon with melted butter is super helpful for this).

Slide it into a moderate oven and bake it for about twenty minutes at about 130 degrees Celsius in a fan forced oven, probably about 150 degrees Celsius for fifteen minutes in a.....non-fan forced oven. Check it every so often to see if the middle is cooked. You want it to be slightly moist in the centre and golden brown on top.

Once it's cooked, take it out of the oven and let it cool completely. Take it out of the tin and slice it into bars.

Et voila!

Notes

- You may not want to cook these for as long as I did, depending on how doughy you want them.

- They're best served slightly warmed in the microwave so the choc chips melt a tiny, tiny bit.

- Every time I typed 'walnuts' and 'hazelnuts' I accidentally typed them as 'walbuts' and 'hazelbuts.' Hee!

- I'm so tempted to make some more of this dough without the choc chips and mix it with some really, really expensive vanilla ice cream to make my own cookie dough ice cream. 

- These are totally delicious. This is a Fact.

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