Recipe: Quick Oatmeal-Chocolate Chip Bars

I’ve been trying to find recipes lately that would start utilizing some of the left over ingredients that I had purchased before for other recipes. When I saw this recipe I thought this would be great since it seemed that it would turn out to be delicious, easy, and as I panned through the contents, I noticed I had most of what it called for.

On a separate note, I will warn you that this isn’t a recipe that is for people who are dieting or are conscious about corn syrups and sugars since it does call for dark corn syrup and a lot of other sweet things (sugar, sweetened flaked coconut, chocolate, etc.).

Now that the background story and the precautions are out of the way, here’s what I thought.

Baking

The preparation for this dessert was extremely easy. Because it uses Bisquick, which is practically instant cookie dough, putting everything together was a snap. It took about 10-15 minutes. The “most difficult” part was melting the butter (or, in this case, margarine) with the dark corn syrup on the stovetop.

There was little clean-up (a saucepan, a bowl, a measuring cup, and 2 spoons).

It took 40 minutes in the oven. I set the timer to 35 and I probably could’ve taken them out then, but I left them in for a couple more minutes for extra measure.

Finally, I liked that the bars didn’t have to be removed from the pan that I used. I simply cut the bars, left them in the glass dish, and put a cover on it.

I definitely give this an A+.

Taste

I was very eager to try these seeing as how I love the combination of oats and chocolate. I wasn’t disappointed. They were very chewy, and a little on the tough side. I attribute this to leaving it in the oven a couple of minutes longer than it should have. I also felt the taste was really oat-y, which I enjoy, but I probably could’ve cut back just a little. The coconut flavor wasn’t overpowering. In fact, it added a nice background flavor to it. The peanuts were the strangest dynamic to this. In retrospect I probably should have chopped the peanuts a little bit since it was weird and a little bit much on my palette when I encountered a cluster of peanuts in my bar.

Over all, I give the taste an A. I loved how chewy they were and I loved how all of the tastes blended together.

Recipe

Quick Oatmeal-Chocolate Chip Bars (taken from Creative Recipes with Bisquick vol. II, 1986)

1/3 cup margarine or butter

¼ cup dark corn syrup

1 ½ cups Bisquick baking mix

1 ½ cups quick-cooking oats

½ cup sugar

½ cup flaked coconut

½ cup salted peanuts

1 package (6 ounces) semisweet chocolate chips

1 egg

Heat oven to 300.

Mix margarine and corn syrup in 1 quart saucepan over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, until margarine is melted; reserve. Mix remaining ingredients except egg in large bowl; stir in corn syrup mixture and egg until moistened. Pat in ungreased rectangular pan, 13x9x2 inches.

Bake until light golden brown, 35 to 40 minutes. Immediately cut into bars, about 3 x 1 ½ inches; cool in pan 20 minutes. Remove from pan; cool completely.

Makes 40 bars.