baking experiments!

hello blog land!

this weekend my future mother in law is came to town and we had dinner with some other family members on saturday night.  i was asked to bring a dessert, which gave me the chance to try a recipe i've been excited about for a while: salted caramel chocolate bars!

my friend allison has made these several times, and i always (a) eat too many of them and (b) get her to let me take some home! so, it was finally time for me to attempt them.  first, the crust:

then, after that's baked for ten minutes, you just layer on chocolate chips, caramel topping, and more crust.  i found it hard to get the second crust to crumble on evenly/well - maybe i had too much melted butter and thus it wasn't crumbly enough?  or, it might just be that i didn't have enough crust overall and you need a bit more than it calls for.  at any rate, i ended up mixing up just a little bit more to make sure it was completely covered before i baked for another 20 minutes:

 before baking

 after baking! yum!

 side view - look at all the melty gooey chocolate and caramel!

 I let them sit in the fridge for about 24 hours to make sure they congealed before cutting them up.  The verdict? They were a total hit!  The kids each ate three pieces (we cut them up pretty small, haha) and all the adults had at least two :-)  In the future, I'd say you need way more salt than the recipe calls for.  But, I'd definitely make this again!