Kiwi treats

Kiwi Family moved house a few weeks ago and when I went to visit I took a couple of treats with me to remind them of their many recent travels. The first was a reprise of a New Zealand biscuit I made for the first time when they were away - Afghans. This time I used a recipe a Kiwi friend recommended, from the charmingly-named website Ladies, a plate. They are darkly chocolatey biscuits which contain cornflakes - which the recipe description says was a way of using up last bits and pieces in the pantry. Well, I don't need to tell any readers who are still left after being so disgracefully neglected for the past few weeks, that this appealed to my 'eke eke' philosophy immediately. The biscuits had a rich chocolate topping as well which I found I had to thin a bit more to spread - but which was very popular with the Munchkin as well as his parents.


The second treat was particularly for Kiwi Bro, who had just started his new job the day I went to visit. I'd remembered that he said he liked millionaires shortbread, so I made a Kiwi favourite tray bake - Tan Slice. Tray bakes seem to be particularly popular in both Australia and New Zealand, often using coconut and condensed milk. I got this recipe from Kiwi blogger Tammy who has posted several enticing variants and favourites. She also has a chocolate version I'm keen to try - and her philosophy of a greater caramel to base ratio has surely got to win all tasters over. It turned out as I made the slice that it wasn't quite what I had assumed when thinking of something like our millionaire's shortbread. Instead it was slightly more like a cake mixture which formed the base and also the top layer. The base didn't need baking before adding the caramel either which surprised me, but makes it all even easier. I was expecting a good response just from the sheer level of sugary goodness in the slice, but it did even better. Kiwi Sis texted me after I'd left to say they were swooning over it, and they had to fend off their dinner guests with pointy sticks (actually I made up the pointy sticks but there was definitely some fending going on).


So thank you to Alexa and Tammy - definitely a pair of Kiwi keepers!


Afghan recipe here

Tan slice recipe here

A very English flapjack

I interrupt raspberry transmission with another blog post for the Norse Goddess. It turned out when we were visiting in Vancouver that she hadn't come across a flapjack before - or not an English type one anyway. So in the spirit of sharing culture, I hastened to make some so I could share the recipe.

Yes, I am pretending I've made M&S flapjack bites. What of it?

I've made flapjacks several times recently but have never actually blogged about them. Plus I've never made the same recipe twice and so don't have a particular favourite. Even Marcus Wareing's (which I mentioned in passing as a gamers' treat) was felt to be 'as good as another flapjack but not outstanding' by my Scientist Connoisseur of All Things Butter and Syrupy. He's quite strict in his requirements for flapjack, which actually, are quite similar to his requirements for trifle: keep it simple. I found a good and simple recipe on the website of Lyle's Golden Syrup - (so many good words) - makers of sugar and syrup, and felt there was no better a place to start my search for the latest offering for the Gamers.


Flapjack, is essentially, melted butter, sugar and golden syrup with oats stirred into it, and baked. You can see why it's a favourite really, can't you? In America, however (as I learnt here) it is a sweet flatbread cooked on a griddle. Madness. It's no wonder the Norse Goddess was confused. The smell of all that lovely golden meltingness does smell pretty alluring even for someone like me who's not so fussed about eating the finished product. This recipe evidently got its proportions just right as the flapjacks were a hit and I am happy to make it my go-to fave. Of course you can add all sorts of extras - dried fruit, seeds, nuts, chocolate all work, and there are approximately a squillion other recipes on the web featuring other goodies. But not if you're eating it in this house, ok?

Lyle's Golden Syrup recipe here

Oaty banana bars - new snack of choice

I've been trying to think of some new healthy snacks recently, and fancied trying out some variation on a seedy munchy bar. Seeds are a good way to get some good oils into my snacks since I don't like nuts, and I thought that oats and bananas would be a good way to keep them moist, sweet and substantial enough to see me through an afternoon of battling with data not meant for twenty-first-century analysis (standardised names? Pah. Dates which correspond with the modern calendar? Piffle. Entries obscured by 18th century dirt? A mere trifle).

You get the picture; let's get back to the bananas.


I searched around for recipes that featured my main ingredients and came upon a site called Patty Cakes - a blog by a Canadian baker who features lots of healthy recipes which are suited to various special diets as well. This was a recipe called Banana Booty Bars which immediately tickled my fancy, and even more so when I noticed that Patty had included a variation which used coconut oil. I had bought some of this on the Norse Goddess's recommendation, and it's also favoured by one of my favourite bloggers, Heidi of 101 Cookbooks and Super Natural Cooking. It's unrefined, which I like, and it's also solid at room temperature which is sort of fun. If you use the oil they're vegan, and they're also wheat-free. I omitted the walnuts and used sunflower seeds instead, and raisins instead of the dates. I did add some grated orange peel, but decided to try them without choc chips this time. So many variations!


The bars were really delicious. I was probably quite light-handed with the sugar as I wanted them to be fruity-sweet, and it was just the right balance. They didn't taste particularly of coconut but it was nice to know that the fat was a relatively healthy one. The raisins and bananas together kept them really moist, while the oats and seeds lent them bulk and crunch. I made half a batch in a standard loaf tin, so they were quite thick. They were still lovely two days later, and I've put the rest in the freezer to snack on when the data get particularly obstructive. They're great with a cup of tea, and they travel well, too (I ate one on the train home and didn't even get crumbs on my laptop. Though it might explain why I seemed to have an oat stuck under my Ctrl key most of the morning....) Go on, make these now, and go and have a look at Patty's other great recipes too!

Banana Booty Bars (vegan and wheat free): recipe here

Epicurean shortbread fingers

I asked The Scientist what he would like me to make him for a trip recently, and he pretty promptly settled on shortbread 'like the sort you get in packs with a cup of tea'. I was quite pleased he felt so strongly about it - I haven't felt very decisive about cooking recently and this way there was no chance I could keep myself awake fretting over the merits of cookies versus bars. Well, less chance at least. I fretted over what to do with the rest of our veg box carrots instead. I've made shortbread bases before - for the millionaire's shortbread I made Eco Sis, for example, but I've always been put off the most traditional standalone recipes because they call for rice flour. My baking cupboard is in enough of a state without allowing myself to buy more speciality ingredients, and we only have brown rice in the house, which probably wouldn't make for a nice fluffy tea time treat.


A couple of weeks ago though, we went to Coventry for a little shopping trip, and I wandered into the market in search of a weigh-shop I knew was there. You know the sort of place - lots of bins of household goods that you help yourself to, and then pay according to weight. This sort of place is my idea of nirvana, and The Scientist was soon weighed down with little bags, with a tolerant expression on his face. The things you can get though! Cake mix! It had never previously occurred to me that you would want to buy cake mix by weight, and with no instructions. Six different types of breakfast cereal, tapioca, flour, washing powder (better not get those two mixed up), custard powder, nuts, spices - and it's only a small shop. I bought at least five or six different things, none of them big, but still, I wasn't expecting change from a fiver. £1.60. I kid you not. I wish we lived in Coventry - and I have never said that before (though I said it again when we found a nice little noodle place for lunch).


Anyway, you may have guessed that I have included this whimsical digression because one of the things I found at the weigh place was rice flour, so I could make the shortbread. Recipes for shortbread seem pretty ubiquitous but I wanted to make sure I hit the maximum heights, so I got out our copy of Marcus Wareing's How to Cook the Perfect... We've never eaten at a Michelin starred restaurant - try that on two academics' salaries with a fusspot semi-vegan as part of the party - but we like Marcus Wareing when he appears on cheffie programs, and his book includes little tips on how to get the best out of the recipe. In this case, it was handle the butter as little as possible, and rub it into the rest of the ingredients by grating it and rolling it all between your palms. The Scientist had been so particular about the shape of the shortbread that I got him to cut it, but - alas - when I took them out of the pan one broke and he was forced to try it. Let's just say that Marcus Wareing is still number one top chef dude in our house. I made his flapjack recipe at the same time, which directs you to part-bake it, then take it out and drizzle melted syrup over the top before returning to the oven. This makes the top moist and the middle crunchy apparently. Or the other way round; I forget. I'll report back on whether that worked when The Scientist gets back. In the meantime I still have those carrots to attend to.

Marcus Wareing's shortbread (from How to Cook the Perfect...)
Makes about 20 pieces

200g plain white flour
Pinch of fine salt
40g ground rice
75g caster sugar, plus extra for dusting
175g unsalted butter, from a chilled 250g block

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl and stir in the ground rice and sugar. Grate in the butter, then work it quickly into the flour until the mixture resembles fine breadcrumbs.

Press the mixture into a 20cm square baking tin and level the top. Chill in the fridge for about an hour.

Heat the oven to 140C fan/160C/Gas 3

Bake the shortbread for 40 minutes until light golden. Remove from the oven and prick all over with a fork, then mark into 20 pieces, cutting right through to the bottom of the tin. Dust liberally with caster sugar, then leave to cool before removing from the tin.

Marshmallow ghosts for gamers

The Scientist has gone to a role playing convention with some friends for four days. I miss him already, but I have tried to dull the pain by baking some of the things I had on my 'oooh, that looks nice' list (or more properly, the 'nom nom nom list') for him to take away with him. These were a fun last-minute surprise addition to the pile. I got the recipe from (I think) Sainsbury's magazine and they're part of a set sponsored by a big breakfast cereal company all featuring - well, you can guess. I immediately leapt up to the moral high ground when I saw the advert but thought that the ghosties were so cute that I went out and spent twice as much on an organic brand of puffed rice cereal just to show them. Bah!


The ghosts were really easy to make, but were very messy. I think that children would have a lot of fun helping to make them, but that you would then have to spend a lot of time unsticking said children from everything they had touched. They are also not, in the state I made them, vegetarian, as they have marshmallows in them. But you can get veggie marshmallows if you look a bit so they could be made vegetarian pretty easily.


All you do is melt a bit of butter (I used marge) with the marshmallows until they are a completely goopy puddle. Then you stir in the cereal, and while it's warm, form into ghost shapes and roll in desiccated coconut. Stick on little currant eyes and a mouth, and you're all set for spooking. I had some mixed dried fruit but I couldn't find enough currants in it, so my ghosts have quite large eyes, and dried peel for mouths instead of o-shaped cereal. I like it that one of them looks like it has a beak :) I can't report on how they taste as I am awaiting a report from The Scientist and his buddies. I think that probably my cereal was less sweet than the big brand, but I'm hoping that the marshmallow and coconut will make up for that. And if it doesn't, they have a LOT of other sweet things to make up for it!

Marshmallow ghosts (recipe from this big corporation - though the picture on my recipe card looked like the ones I made)

Kvelling over marbled millionaire's shortbread

Kvelling is a Yiddish word meaning 'glowing with pride'. I was kvelling about my shortbread because, if I say so myself, it was darned pretty, and since it was a gift for Eco Sis, I was all the happier. I made this shortbread for Eco Sis because I went to stay with her so we could have a sisterly day out together on Monday; because she likes millionaire's shortbread; because I wanted to bake it; and because it reminded me of a little story about her childhood.


When we were young, Kiwi Sis and I had piano lessons or some such activity after school which took up a relatively short amount of time, and wasn't worth Munchkin Granny and the small Eco Sis going home. So they used to go to a cafe nearby wherever we were (Oadby, in Leicester where we lived at the time, so Munchkin Granny told me at the weekend when we were reminiscing about it) and have a drink and a cake. It was a fun cafe over a gift shop, and the most memorable thing about it was that it had stuffed heads mounted on the walls. But these were stuffed toy heads, and the owner could stand on the other side of the wall and put his hand in them to make them move and talk. It was great fun keeping an eye on them to see if they were going to wake up and entertain us. Anyway, Eco Sis had a favourite cake at this cafe which she called 'the cake with long legs'. It was a bar cake, and the long legs were the stripy decoration (I'm not sure if I ever saw these cakes, but I imagine a Mr Kipling-esque slice - though less squiggly than the ones in the link). That's how cute Eco Sis was when she was little.

When I was looking out for recipes to make her a millionaire's shortbread - which is, incidentally, shortbread topped with caramel topped with chocolate - I found a recipe on Cookie Baker Lynn's blog which had a marbled chocolate top instead of a plain one. It immediately struck me that if I marbled it correctly I could give it 'long legs'. Unfortunately I completely forgot about the long legs when I actually came to the marbling as I got so carried away with the delights of making pretty patterns. However, as our great-grandmother used to say, 'it's the thought that counts'.

Striped and ready to drizzle

I used the recipe for Roxanne's Millionaire's Shortbread from Nigella's How to be a Domestic Goddess, which has handily appeared on various blogs. I halved the recipe since Eco Bro was away and I didn't want to make Eco Sis practice her coma resuscitation skills on herself, but it must make a whole heap of shortbread in its original quantity, as you can see that it still filled a square brownie pan. Nigella's instructions are to make the caramel in the microwave but I did mine in a saucepan as I was worried about burning either it or myself, as our microwave is very high up! I wasn't really sure how long to simmer it for, and my caramel could have been a bit firmer, but the taste was still there. I followed Cookie Baker Lynn's instructions for marbling though, by melting dark and milk chocolate separately, and painting them in stripes over the cake. Then I melted some white chocolate and dabbled it over the top of that, before using a cake tester to make marbled patterns through all three chocolates. Then I sat with it on my knee all the way to Oxford in the car and prayed for The Scientist to drive gently! (He did)

Drizzled and ready to marble

While my millionaire's shortbread did not have long legs, it got a very favourable response from Eco Sis (and her housemates!). The shortbread layer was quite thick, and I would perhaps reduce the quantity even further another time so that the caramel shone through a little more. With that much goopy goodness though, I don't think anyone will be complaining too much, long legs or no :) (And our sisterly day out in the Cotswolds was lots of fun too - the rain stopped us doing our walk, but we found a sewing shop and did cross-stitch in a cafe instead!)

Roxanne's Millionaire's Shortbread recipe is posted in various places
Instructions for marbling, and an alternative recipe here

Festivals and picnics

Once more unto the festival breach we went, and this time the sun shone and the heat beat down. After our wash-out (though still enjoyable) experience of Henley Festival, we were keen for a taste of a more traditional festival. Eco Sis had done a thorough trawl of possibilities earlier in the summer, and we picked Womad, a festival of world music held near Malmesbury in Wiltshire as our second try. It could hardly have been more different from the Henley Festival (although it did share one band - Show of Hands, the folk duo plus guest singer we'd enjoyed so much). It was much bigger, much hotter, with a lot more bands, and generally a lot less clothing per visitor. Bikini tops and small shorts were the order of the day for the ladies, and bare chests for a lot of the men. We all stayed a lot more clad ourselves, but it was the sort of place where anything went. The whole festival lasted all weekend and there was a nice leisurely atmosphere, no doubt cultivated by the people who were in no particular rush as they had days to soak up the rays and the music. We just went for the Sunday but the chilled feeling rubbed off on us too, and we definitely took things at a nice slow pace.

Picnic: individual drunken-housemate-surviving Eco salad at bottom; pongy Eco cheese to left; roast aubergine dip, right; roast pepper dip, top right

We got there at about 12.30, so we started off with a picnic on the grass in listening distance of the BBC3 tent, in the shade of a tree (The Scientist and I both get grumpy if we're in the sun too much, and I didn't like to inflict that on the Ecos). We brought our posh picnic backpack with us, plus some pittas, an aubergine dip and a red pepper dip, both courtesy of Moosewood Low Fat Favourites. The aubergine one, which is flavoured with sesame oil, soy sauce, star anise seeds and rice vinegar, was a big hit, though the roasted pepper one (with cannellini beans and lemon) needed a bit more flavour [update: the leftovers made a very nice pasta sauce with some softened onion and fennel :)]. The Ecos offered some delightfully pongy cheese (I was so relieved when they got it out as I'd thought the aroma was something odd in our car! Or them, but I hadn't liked to mention that) and some salad, very ingeniously packed in one-person-portions in saved take-away containers that they could bin. There were recycling bins everywhere round the ground, so we could even dispose of them thoughtfully. Their plan had been slightly scuppered when their housemate got home drunk the night before and ate one of the salads, but they had been generous in their portions, so no matter. For dessert I'd made a raspberry and oat slice, based on a tried and trusted Delia recipe for plum and cinnamon oat slice. I'd healthied it up a bit in the past, substituting half of the butter with applesauce, and cutting back on the sugar. I'd actually meant to include some choc chips this time as I had become taken with the combination of raspberries and chocolate when I saw the lush berries at our farmers market this week, but forgot. I was probably too busy eating the extra berries and lost focus. Anyway, this time I subbed raspberries and coconut instead of plums and cinnamon and it was delicious. I halved the recipe and it made one big slice each. Oh, those berries were good. I wish I'd bought more.


The picnic taken care of we meandered into the main part of the park, and spent some time ambling, orienting ourselves, and narrowly missing a lot of music through indecisiveness and distractability. There were several very big tents and several smaller ones, and the acts ranged over practically the whole globe including song, instrumentals and dance. We watched a dance display but didn't dare join in, and a Japanese drumming workshop which looked and sounded amazing. We got ourselves organised to listen to a Chinese singer which was very good, though got a bit much for me after a while, so I went for a wander round the stalls and craft stands. I managed to restrict myself to buying a couple of cards - Eco Bro got the award for most inventive purchase: a mandolin, which he stashed back in the car asap to avoid being asked for a performance (he has yet to learn how to play it, but we await an impromptu virtuoso rendition with Eco Sis on the tin whistle at our next visit).

Festival flags and Big Blue Tent

As well as clothing, craft and music stalls there were loads of food vendors and a lot of veggie options. We fitted in a quick taste survey before Show of Hands came on - the Ecos both went for burritos (Eco Bro's favourite) which were ok, I had a garlic mushroom crepe which was v tasty (cue 'I'm loving my dinner' dance), and The Scientist had a chickeny thing in pitta, and then a banana and chocolate crepe with enough chocolate to induce a sugar coma. Luckily he recovered in time to drive home. Show of Hands were just as good as they were in Henley (though slightly more casually dressed) and I've since ordered two of their CDs as I liked them so much. By that time it was mercifully cooler, and we headed off home at about 8.30. I realise that this post is a bit short on the music we heard but really it was more about soaking up atmosphere and background music than hearing particular bands for us. The choice was amazing, and although I enjoyed good old West Country Show of Hands the most, the Japanese drumming was a good second. I get grumpy when I camp as well so I'm not sure I'd go for the whole thing, but you could possibly bribe me with the vegan canteens!

Show of Hands with guest Miranda Sykes performing

I'm sending my picnic raspberry oaty slices to Susan at Food Blogga as she's hosting this month's Sugar High Friday, which has berries as its theme.


Raspberry oaty slices (adapted from Delia)

Makes 4 large slices or 8 squares

225g raspberries (I used fresh but I'm sure frozen would work - though might need draining)
1 tsp desiccated coconut (or more - you couldn't taste them too strongly in my version)
75g porridge oats
140g plain wholemeal flour
1/2 tsp salt
55g butter/marge
55g unsweetened applesauce
30-55g light brown soft sugar, depending on taste (the lower end isn't too sweet but not in the 'this must be good for me' bracket)

Pre-heat the oven to gas mark 6/400F/200C.

Lightly grease a loaf tin

Place berries in a bowl and toss gently with the coconut.

Mix the flour and oats together with the salt in a mixing bowl, then melt the butter and sugar in a small saucepan over a fairly low heat, stirring from time to time until the butter has melted. Add the melted butter and sugar to the oat mixture, and then add the applesauce. Mix, starting with a wooden spoon but finishing off with your hands so you end up with a lump of dough. Halve the dough and press one half into the cake tin, pressing it down ('like a wall-to-wall carpet', says Delia, but you get the general idea). Next scatter the berries evenly over the surface, then top with the remaining oat mixture, again pressing down firmly.

Bake on the centre shelf of the oven for 25-30 mins, or a bit longer if you like it crispier. Remove from oven and allow to cool for about 10 mins before marking out squares or slices. Serve warm, or allow to cool completely in the tin.

Three-cornered baking

I was very excited on Thursday as the day marked three significant things: firstly the first day of spring (hooray!), secondly the spring equinox (hooray – days are now longer than nights!), and the Jewish festival of Purim.

The first two are fairly self-explanatory. The third marks the Jews’ escape from a terrible fate at the hands of the Persian King Ahasuerus, who had been inveigled into signing a decree that would kill them all by his evil Vizier, Haman. I pause to note that Vizier is a very good word, and somehow suggestive of evil plotting in its own right. Do we still have viziers nowadays or do they remain in legend only, I wonder? Luckily, in this case, the king’s brave and beautiful queen Esther (who was, unbeknownst to her husband, a Jew herself) and her uncle Mordecai managed to foil the plot, and Haman himself was the one who was hanged on the gallows he had built for his enemies. I think we should probably focus on the survival of the Jews part rather than the horrible retribution part, personally, as it makes me uncomfortable.

Like so many Jewish festivals, Purim celebrations brought fun and food. The story is read out in Hebrew from the Book of Esther in synagogue, and whenever Haman’s name is mentioned everyone makes as much noise as they can by stamping their feet, waving rattles, and shaking bean-filled yogurt pots lovingly made at their Hebrew Sunday school (though no doubt it’s all more high-tech than that nowadays). The children dress up and get given sweets, and it’s traditional to give food as gifts to friends, and to charity. My only clear memory of a costume I wore as a child was a hanky fairy dress, which Munchkin Granny made for me out of a lot of handkerchiefs my grandfather had had left over from some sales venture. It consisted of one handkerchief for the front and one for the back sewn together at the shoulders (I was a skinny little thing), and then lots more hankys sewn by one corner round the bodice edge. I loved it, and was the only girl not dressed up as Queen Esther with a tall pointy hat with a veil strung from the back that year. Munchkin Granny herself was made amazing costumes as a child by Israel Granny, although she remembers the year she was a wire and crepe paper lily with some trauma, as it completely prevented her from sitting down or going to the toilet. Her brothers were variously match boxes, bumble bees and chefs, which testify to some extraordinary degree of ingenuity on the part of Israel Grandma, not to say skill with crepe paper.

Food-wise, the classic at Purim is hamentaschen, which are triangular pastries filled with jam or poppy seeds – or more recently, chocolate. They are triangular apparently to commemorate Haman’s three-cornered hat (so the traditional song goes), although the name means Haman’s pocket in German, and seems to have derived from Yiddish. I really wanted to make some this year but I knew we’d never get round to eating them all, so in the end I decided to make a lightened version which I might actually eventually disinter from the freezer and munch my way through.

Clearly the most important thing is the shape – they had to be triangular. As far as the filling was concerned I was keen to incorporate my love of dried figs, of which I currently have a superabundance due to an inability to resist two for the price of one offers. Then I remembered a recipe for lightened fig bars I’d found on the Cooking Light website a while back, and thought they could easily be cut triangular. Ta da – a hamentasch done light.

The recipe, when I dug it out, turned out to have a biscuity base, a figgy filling, and a cream cheese topping. All were easy to do, and all tasted very nice on their own out of the bowl. The filling wasn’t too hard to spread over the base, although the cream cheese topping was quite scanty. I halved the recipe as I didn’t have much cream cheese, and after much dithering, baked it in an 8’’ brownie tin. This made quite thin hamentaschen, but you could still taste all three layers, and probably make me more likely to eat them. Actually I would eat them however thick they were, as they were really tasty, rich with the dried fruit, and smooth on top from the cream cheese. They aren’t exactly authentic since they don’t have a pastry case, but I think they pass muster on a Purim themed treat. The Scientist liked them too, and snaffled two with his cup of tea. I don’t quite like to inflict my low-fat baking preferences on other people (although I’m sure they couldn’t have guessed with these little gems, so probably I just kidded myself that was why I had to keep them all), so I made some other things to give away.

We went visiting family yesterday, so for The Scientist’s parents I made some Easter biscuits (gaily mixing my cultural heritage – Easter is just a cultural festival as far as I’m concerned), and for Granny T and Munchkin Granny, the pecan and sour cream biscuits that the Tuesdays with Dorie blog group made a few weeks ago.

I assumed from the photos some of them had posted that I was making what we would call shortbread, although I was somewhat surprised at the amount of baking powder that went in. I tasted a bit of one when they came out of the oven, and it was delicious. They definitely weren’t shortbread-like though, but what we would call a scone. I am always unsure of what Americans mean by biscuits, despite endless discussions with Eco Bro about it, so this is one step closer to elucidation (I have another step in the pipeline thanks to Eco Bro’s recent trip to America, but that’s for another day). They all went down very well with their recipients, anyway, fulfilling all my Purim cultural requirements. I’ve linked to the Dorie biscuit recipe on Eat me, Delicious blog above, and the Easter biscuits were a very simple all-spice one from an old school fund-raising cookbook I have. I might post the recipe another time, but this is already getting rather long! Munchkin Granny tells me that she still has the hanky fairy dress somewhere, so that may feature on here some time, too. As to the first day of spring, it unfortunately went rapidly downhill when a 96-page document arrived in my inbox for meticulous checking, which I didn’t finish until 7.30 that night. Boy, did I earn my hamentasch that evening. I’ll have to make my bean-filled yogurt-pot shaker another day.

Fig and Cream Cheese Bars (from Cooking Light)

1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/3 cups plain flour
3/4 cups packed brown sugar
6 tablespoons chilled butter, cut into small pieces
Cooking spray
2 cups dried figs, stems removed
1 cup water
1/2 cup granulated sugar, divided
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
3/4 cup (6 ounces) 1/3-less-fat cream cheese, softened
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 large egg
2 teaspoons powdered sugar

Preparation

Preheat oven to 350°.

Lightly spoon flour into a dry measuring cup; level with a knife. Combine flour, brown sugar, and salt, stirring well with a whisk. Cut in butter with a pastry blender or 2 knives until mixture resembles coarse meal. Press mixture firmly into a 13 x 9-inch baking dish coated with cooking spray.

Combine figs, water, and 1/4 cup granulated sugar in a medium saucepan; bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Cook 5 minutes or until figs are tender and sugar dissolves. Cool slightly. Place fig mixture and juice in a blender; process until smooth. Gently spread fig mixture over prepared crust.

Place remaining 1/4 cup granulated sugar, cheese, vanilla, and egg in a medium bowl; beat with a mixer at medium speed until smooth. Pour over fig mixture; spread to edges. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes or until set and lightly browned. Cool in pan on a wire rack; sprinkle with powdered sugar.

30 servings (serving size: 1 bar)