It’s kind of like Christmas Day when our Food Network Magazine comes in the mail. We can’t wait to sit and drool over it’s pages and make an evil plan of the order in which we will conquer it’s recipes. In every issue, you get a little insert, where they feature 50 things – sometimes it’s “50 things to do with a jar of spaghetti sauce” or “50 breakfasts on the fly” or “50 pies.” The one that came a few months back was a combination of our sweetest dreams and worst nightmares: “50 bar cookies.” Nooooooooooo! Mom knew she was in trouble. She stared at the thing for like an hour straight the first day, reading every ingredient of all 50 bars to determine what her favorites would be. Most of us in this house love coffee flavor, though we don’t drink coffee (coffee flavored ice cream is our favorite flavor). SO, when we saw the name if these beauties, we had to go for it. It beckoned us.
We adore cookie bars because they are soft and chewy and we can skip the edges if we want and have 3 or 4 sides of thick, soft wonderfulness. These bars are really decadent and wonderful, but you know what is also wonderful? The batter! This batter smells HEAVENLY. Dad, who doesn’t particularly care for coffee flavor, enjoyed these bars and commented on how the coffee isn’t too strong. So you’ll win over both coffee-flavor-lovers and non alike. Have fun with this one.
Note: as non-coffee-drinkers, we had a hard time finding instant espresso powder. We ended up grabbing a bag that was labeled “espresso powder” at TJ Maxx Home, but the package didn’t indicate that it was “instant” anywhere. The grounds weren’t as fine as we thought they should be, so we ground it even finer in our Ninja spice grinder attachment. It worked out wonderfully well.
From: Glazed Cappuccino Bars
- 2 sticks softened butter
- 2 T instant espresso powder
- 1 cup sugar
- 1 cup brown sugar
- 3 eggs
- 1.5 tsp vanilla
- 3 cups flour
- ¾ tsp baking soda
- ¾ tsp salt
- 12 oz bag semi-sweet chocolate chips (preferably mini)
- For the glaze:
- 1 cup powdered sugar
- 1-2 T hot water
- ½ tsp vanilla
- Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
- Beat the softened butter, both sugars and the espresso powder with a mixer on medium high speed until fluffy.
- Add the eggs and vanilla. Reduce the speed to low.
- Add the flour, baking soda and salt. Beat until combined.
- Stir in the chocolate chips.
- Prepare 9x13 pan with parchment, leaving an overhang so you can pull them out of the pan when cool.
- Bake until a toothpick inserted into the middle comes out clean, about 31 to 33 minutes.
- To make the glaze, whisk the confectioners sugar with hot water and the vanilla until smooth. Drizzle over the cold bars.
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