TWD: Chocolate Oatmeal Almost Candy-Bars

Another Tuesdays with Dorie and I'm just glad I was able to participate. This week's recipe is for Chocolate Oatmeal Almost Candy-Bars, as chosen by Lillian at Confectionia's Realm.

A bar cookie such as these would normally be right up my alley, but lately I'm just not that into really, really 'heavy' cookie type desserts like this one - perhaps because baby is making me feel plenty heavy all on her own. Since ultimately the recipe didn't really reduce all that well (no half-size cans of sweetened condensed milk around here that I could find - if they even exist) that I decided to forget about trying to reduce the size of the batch and just make the whole kit and kaboodle instead. Which made a lot of cookies.

I decided that, since we are now in the home stretch with this pregnancy (six weeks to go and looking good!) that I would just cut the bars and freeze the bulk of them for times in the near future when I need a little snack. While I haven't tried one straight from the freezer yet, they remind me of a similar cookie that a friend of mind makes that is delicious frozen, so why not. Otherwise, I'll just let them thaw a bit - maybe I'll even just end up taking a box of these with me to the hospital to share with the nurses and staff and visitors or something - I'm sure they would be appreciated there.

The only change I ended up making to the recipe was to just leave out the raisins in the chocolate layer, which worked just fine. I'm just learning to try to like raisins in the first place, but I still just can't seem to get behind the chocolate/raisin combo. Maybe someday!

Be sure to check out how the rest of the TWD Bakers faired this week - it seemed like there were a lot of substitution ideas bouncing around during the P&Q so there should be some interesting variations out there.