Recipe: No bake chocolate chip cookie bars

Recipe: No bake chocolate chip cookie bars
Source: Chocablog: The chocolate blog 

I recently had a non-diet weekend where I was seeing various family members and friends so I decided it would be nice to make something for them. I was short for time so I needed something quick and easy and I realised it would be a great opportunity to try this recipe for No bake chocolate chip cookie bars that I’ve had bookmarked from Chocablog: The chocolate blog for quite a while. It looked simple but effective and I was excited to make something a bit different that contained one of my favourite things: white chocolate!

I had planned to use rich tea biscuits in the recipe but, being the cheapskate that I am, I changed this to digestives when I discovered they were cheaper! (I later found that this was a blessing in disguise when a couple of relatives commented that the digestive provided a lovely flavour and that rich tea would have been too plain.) The only other ingredients ‘issue’ I had was my tin of condensed milk was 3g short although I didn’t think this would be a problem!

Using only four ingredients, this recipe required very little effort as the processes were so simple. Having whizzed my biscuits in a food processor, the only ‘work’ that was needed was chopping the chocolate, and stirring the mixture since this became more stiff as the biscuit crumbs became more combined.

Having initially overestimated the size of tin I needed, I managed to transfer my finished mixture into a more suitable tin, and quickly discovered that the best way to smooth it out was with a palette knife rather than the back of a spoon. I hadn’t expected it to be quite so stiff and fudge-like at this stage (it was a combined lump rather than a liquid when putting it in the tin) but once I’d adjusted to this, it was easy to achieve the desired result.

In the process of making these bars, I had tried a bit of the mixture from the saucepan and found it to be delicious but very sweet. This concerned me slightly in that I know not everyone has as sweet a tooth as me, but I did hope that the biscuits would help reduce this sweetness.

When the bars had cooled, I was fascinated that the individual components could be detected in the smell, as well as the taste. As anticipated, the chocolate chip cookie bars were sweet but, thankfully, did become more palatable with the addition of the biscuits. That said, they were the kind of sweet treat that would be hard to eat too many of at once since they would quickly become sickly (with me around, that’s a good thing!). Of course, the whole point of this recipe was to deliver an end result reminiscent of cookie dough. I didn’t mention this to my samplers but one of them instantly said ‘It’s like cookie dough!’ whilst the others simply commented on how delicious they were.

Prior to making these bars, I couldn’t quite imagine what they would be like texturally, and it turns out they were very fudgy – they had the squidginess of regular fudge yet the slight grainy-dustiness (from the crumbs) as butter tablet. I did find, though, that this ratio differed depending on whether they were eaten straight from the fridge or at room temperature.

This recipe was a success and, although not the most amazing sweet treats I’ve ever made, I loved how different they were, particularly after requiring so little effort. I made 24 bars and they only just lasted as many hours – everybody enjoyed them and most people went back for more if they could!

Thanks, Chocablog, for such a great resource. 

Ease of recipe: 9.5/10
Finished product: 7/10
Overall score: 8.25/10
Make again? Yes