Mars Bar Cookies

Mars Bar Cookies
Home Cooking



I made these cookies a good couple of months ago for my end of Semester 1 clinic party. I hadn't baked anything in a while so it was a bit rusty getting back into it. You can probably see the result of this in that my cookies are ahem... 'unattractive' to say the least. Thinking back, I actually made them in the share house I was living at and I've since moved. How fast time flies by...



When I first started baking, I had a recipe up my sleeve for 'Subway-style' cookies made with condensed milk in the dough. They were so easy to do and came out perfect every time. The result is this sticky, chewy cookie with a slightly crunchy outside. The recipe is just for a basic dough and you can get creative and add whatever you like to it.


I thought I'd do something similar but because I don't like repeating recipes (simply for the reason that I want to have more things to blog), I spent the effort Googling a new recipe. Whatever happened to the rule "Don't fix something that isn't broken"? I don't know. I just like being difficult. I ended up modifying this recipe here by replacing the chocolate chips with broken up Mars Bars and Peanut M and Ms.

Mars Bar Cookies
Makes ~ 30

Ingredients:

• 2 cups plain flour
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 3/4 cup unsalted butter, melted
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 2 kid-sized Mars Bars, chopped (I also used Peanut M and Ms whole)

Procedure:

1. Preheat the oven to 165 degrees Celsius. Grease cookie sheets or line with baking paper.
2. Sift together the flour, baking soda and salt in one bowl.
3. In a medium bowl, cream together the melted butter, brown sugar and white sugar until well blended.4. Beat in the vanilla, egg, and egg yolk until light and creamy.
5. Mix in the sifted ingredients until just blended.
6. Stir in the chopped chocolate by hand using a wooden spoon.7. Roll 1 tsp of cookie dough into a ball on to the baking trays. Repeat. Place balls ~ 3cm apart and flatten slightly with a fork. Note: mine were placed too close together and you'll see what happens as a result.4. Bake for 15 to 17 minutes in the preheated oven, or until the edges are lightly toasted. Cool on baking sheets for a few minutes before transferring to wire racks to cool completely.

I cooled them on my TV :D

At the share house, we didn't have any large flat baking trays so I sort of distributed the cookie dough amongst some cake pans and loaf tins. It was squishy so as they baked, the expanded and got stuck together. All my effort spent rolling the balls was wasted! My cookies ended up being irregular in shape and highly 'amateur'.

If you're curious as to what my cookies are resting on, it's a diary titled 'My Dysfunctions'

I think that's a reason people stayed away from them at first. The other thing is... if you're serving sweets to a dental cohort, it's important to make them at least LOOK like they're not laden with sugar. The addition of Peanut M and Ms was bad for this because the coloring from the shell made the cookies look artificial.

I'm not going to lie... these cookies are very sweet. Did you READ the ingredients list? Yes, that IS 2 types of sugar in vast quantities going into the dough. That's what keeps the inside chewy. That's what makes the exterior crunchy. I suggest eating these in moderation but if you try them, you'll know that it's an effort.

Once my classmates started trying the cookies, they disappeared pretty quickly. Ugly but tasty definitely applies here. They also resemble the cookies from Subway (one girl pointed that out explicitly) so I wouldn't favor this recipe over my old one, simply because that was easier to do and a mixer wasn't NECESSARY. However, when you don't have condensed milk at home, this is a fair alternative.

One of my classmates made this cake. Amazing, yeh?