Tooth-crackingly sweet, these rich bars combine chopped almonds, dried cherries, and chocolate chips on a buttery graham cracker crumb base--perfect for you, for your Valentine . . .
or maybe just because you got your braces off . . .
or maybe because it's Friday?
Sometimes, for no reason, you need to treat yourself. Sometimes you need a reason to treat yourself. Sometimes you need to treat others. Either way, these bars fit the bill. They are made with shelf stable pantry ingredients [
um, plus butter] so you can whip up a batch whenever the mood, or an occasion, strikes. I had a couple of reasons to make these (primarily a band concert, but secondarily a desire to use what I've got in the pantry without venturing out into the snow and #3 [
tertiarily? thirdly?] just plain having a hankering for them.
I could call these Chocolate Cherry Almond Hello Dolly Bars, because growing up our family called the traditional bar cookie made with sweetened condensed milk, chocolate chips, and graham cracker crumbs Hello Dolly Bars. I think they may be better known, outside of my family, as Magic Cookie Bars or Six Layer Bars. I'm calling my version Chocolate Cherry Almond Magic Layer Bars to cover a number of bases.
Whenever I see dented cans of sweetened condensed milk I always pick one up, because they can hang out in the pantry until I'm ready to bake. The regular, non-dented, cans work just fine as well.
Because I've become a homemade granola maker,
thanks to Meghan, I have giant bags of nuts in my fridge. I was looking for something Valentine-ish (because, you know, a Valentine's beet crust pizza needs a dessert) and chocolate and dried cherries seemed like a good combination. And cherries go with almonds [
at least in Jergens hand lotion, love that smell] so I decided to try it in these bars.
While these bars are pretty rich, the addition of the dried cherries means that I used half the amount of chocolate chips I'd usually put in a bar cookie, so there's a little fruit & fiber for ya with your chocolate.
Where's my usual Friday Pizza Post?! New rules for 2014--I'm not going to go crazy trying to ensure I've got a pizza post ready to go every Friday. When I've got pizzas to share (and believe
you me, I've got some pizzas to share. Take a gander at this
Chicken BBQ Peach pizza below) I'll share them on Fridays. Like I share muffins on Monday. But I'll be mixing it up with other recipes as well. Need a pizza fix? Check out my
Visual Pizza Recipe Index for ideas--I've broken my recipes down by pizza dough type, vegetarian pizzas, meat pizzas, and even fruit on pizzas--all savory, all good.
(Amazon Affiliate link) written by a couple of classmates of my mom, Joan Bidinosti and Marilyn Wearring. Over the years and the pans of muffins I've become comfortable with the muffin formula to branch out on my own. I like to make a not-so-sweet muffin--¼ cup of sugar in a batch of muffins is fine by me! Due to the added fruit and chocolate this is an extra sweet (by my standards) muffin, but it's still got whole oats and I'd serve it for brunch or an after school snack.
