Dienstag, 19. Januar 2010

TWD: Chocolate Oatmeal Almost-Candy Bars

For this week, Lillian of Confectiona’s Realm picked Chocolate Oatmeal Almost-Candy Bars. I highly welcomed this choice as I have no idea of bars. Bars are something bought at the supermarket when you have to wait too long in line at the cass. But doin it yourself? Sounds almost as crazy as doin Marshmallows yourself...

But I really do enjoy trying new things. (And there are a lot of new things to be tried out for me as a complete baker novice...)

The bar is made of three layers: two oat-layers on the bottom and on the top, and a chocolate-raisin layer in the middle. Preparing the two different "doughs" was not too difficult. I used spelt instead of oat, merely because I have spelt at home and don't want to have too many cereals at home. I don't need them very often, so they would just stand in the cupboard, and in the worst case attract moths.
I guess it didn't make a big difference. At least it was easy to work with it and I like the taste of spelt.
For the chocolate, I used 50g of 99% Lindt chocolate and ordinary milk chocolate for the rest, as I didn't find semi-sweet chocolate drops. In the end I guess I got something like about 75% chocolate, and I got to say I like this mixture very much. For the rest, I did as the recipe says. (despite that I halved it)

As always I have this cup-problem, as cup measures do not exist here. (maybe I get an imported cup measure for birthday....) So I had no idea how much of the oat/spelt-layer I should put aside. 
I took about 1/3 and it turned out that this was not enough. I had problems covering the chocolate layer, so when I had spread all the remaining spelt-paste in little crumbs over the chocolate-layer, I scattered some more spelt over it, so the chocolate was at least covered slightly everywhere.
My short-fall of the top-layer was compensated by too much chocolate sauce.

I don't know how it happened, but my chocolate layer turned out to be much too much. 


So, what I got is a strange kind of a chocolate bar, that is way too high for a "bar". Anyways, it tasted absolutely delicious!


Recently, the TWD recipes didn't overwhelm me too much. They were ok, but this one I will definitely re-make, not at least because they are so easy to bring to the office and just a perfect treat for the coffee-break!!