This is it! The 10th Day!
And on the 10th Day of Vintage Christmas cookies, I gave to Tom…
Fancy Layer Cookies!!
I was actually really excited to make these bars. The recipe is from a 1959 Pet Milk Pamphlet entitled, “Cookies, Cookies”. With a name like that, the recipes have to be awesome, right? I was also really excited about the having the chocolate and vanilla batter.
- 1 3/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
- 1 tsp salt
- 1/4 tsp baking soda
- 3/4 cup soft shortening
- 1 cup sugar
- 2 eggs
- 1/4 cup PET evaporated Milk
- 1 T water
- 1 tsp vanilla
- 15 graham cracker sqares
- For Chocolate Batter:
- 1/2 tsp vanilla
- 1 oz melted unsweetened chocolate
- 2/3 cup coarsely cut nuts
- 3 T PET evaporated Milk
- For Vanilla Batter:
- 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate pieces
- Sift together first three ingredients.
- Mix shortening, sugar and eggs in a bowl until light and fluffy.
- Add half of flour mixture and beat well. Mix in 1/4 cup PET milk, water and 1 tsp vanilla. Add the rest of the flour mixture and beat well.
- Divide batter. To one bowl of batter, and chocolate batter ingredients. To the other bowl, add the chocolate chips.
- Spread chocolate batter evenly in a greased 13×9 pan and arrange graham crackers on top.
- Drop tablespoons of vanilla batter onto graham gracker layer. Spread evenly to form a third layer.
- Bake in 375 degree oven for 30 mins (*note: Start checking after 20 mins! Mine cooked fast!).
- Cool and cut into 3 dozen bars.
Unfortunately, these didn’t turn out as planned.
The first thing that went wrong was that I noticed while I was making up the batter that this batter was more of a cake batter than a cookie batter. Which is fine, if you want cake. But I didn’t want cake. I wanted cookies.
Secondly, this went wrong:
Can you see my mistake?
Yep, that’s right. I packed too many graham crackers in, so that when the bars were finished and I went to try to cut them, the chocolate layer peeled off the graham cracker layer. Whoops. So, if you are going to try your hand at these, I would recommend leaving more room so that the dough can bake together.
But some of them managed to stay together, and one of those managed to end up in Tom’s mouth.
“These…are not good.”
“Oh, son of a…are you serious?”
“Yeah. They are pretty flavorless. And dry. And what’s with the chocolate part falling off like this?
The Verdict: Not Good
From the Tasting Notes:
Baking a cake batter for extra time and drying it out does NOT make it into a cookie. The bake time on these was way too long. I would say start checking these after 20 mins, and go from there. Also, these could really use some butter, so I would say sub at least half of the shortening for butter. And make sure you space out your graham crackers. Maybe then you will get a good piece of cake out of this.
That’s it for the 10 Days of Vintage Christmas Cookies! Hope you enjoyed the recipes and the Tom faces. I hope everyone has a safe and fun Christmas!!!
