Taste Odyssey #2 - Skor Bar Squares w/Allegedly Vanilla Icing

Recipe: http://www.grouprecipes.com/6489/awesome-skor-squares.html
Recipe: http://www.canadianliving.com/food/creamy_vanilla_frosting.php

I look forward to going to once-a-week posting once I finally catch up to my current experiments in baked goods, but for now you can enjoy as I keep pushing through my check list of culinary conquests.

Important Cross-Border Cooking Clarification - Skor Bars are a chocolate-coated toffee confection that tastes like delicious.  The closest American equivalent for this recipe are Heath Bars.  If they do not sell chips of this product, please don't look too hard at how awesome this recipe is.

Compared to the diabolical complexity of the whole carrot cake experiment, this proved to be a very, very easy follow-up.  On the Superman Scale of Dessert Complexity, the carrot cake was easily a Lex Luthor master plan whereas this one was more like a guy named Doug trying to get out of paying his bar tab. 

This recipe was born from my desire to recreate a similar one that my mother had made some years prior, but I didn't really feel like asking for what she used.  My whole thing here is exploring and trying to learn something, so I went hunting for something that sounded about right and made it.  Undoubtedly the simplest recipe I have attempted so far; the hardest part was getting the icing made. In fact, I whipped up two pans of these in the same time it took to do the carrot cake, if not less.

First off, in terms of ingredients, the only thing that was slightly sketchy here were the Ritz crackers.  You'd be amazed what they hide in food packaging labels and I was still a bit worried after I vetted them that rogue MSG could be lying in wait.  Turns out that this is not the case, I am happy to report.  Icing was a different story; your laboratory bred can of pre-made frosting is a quick and easy fix but it has a list of chemicals that wouldn't sound out of place on a package labelled "Penzoil" let alone "Duncan Hines" and I do not trust them.

But, let's start at the beginning.  Undoubtedly the most enjoyable part of this recipe is the crumbing of the Ritz crackers.  Simple and fast way to do this?  Punch a small hole in the side of the bag, let the air out.  Next grab your rolling pin and just start beating the holy hell out of the crackers.  After you revel in the vicarious thrill of this for a bit, get down to actual business and start rolling the pin over the bag.  The crumbing really depends on your level of devotion to the definition of the term.  I almost want to say that the first bag that had bigger bits in it turned out slightly better but both of them were delicious so it's a matter of preference.

Oh, and this is going to sound utterly dim, but when the recipe calls for condensed milk, they mean sweetened condensed milk.  Which I'm sure for many people is a bit of a 'duh' moment, but I was looking around for quite some time, vainly seeking milk that was just condensed before realizing that such a beast does not exist.

As I say, that was the easy part.  Next came the icing.  You'll notice the term 'Allegedly' up there in the title because it tasted great but the vanilla was probably not as mixed in as it should have been.  Totally my fault, so your results may vary, though it could be that the small amount of vanilla used is overwhelmed by everything else.  I did like this recipe because the icing was amazing, natural, and it made an insane amount.  I can confirm that leftover icing (and there's plenty to frost two pans of this stuff plus a ton extra) will freeze just fine and can be easily thawed out and applied later with no harm to its sugary goodness.

Big food warning regarding the whipping cream though.  I highly recommend coughing up the extra couple bucks for the all-natural stuff (Farm Boy carries it up here, I have heard Trader Joe's has similar in the States).  Your average dairy has thickened its whipping cream with a product on the label called carageenan.  It is a natural food thickener that's found in just about everything that you can imagine needs thickener (and some things that don't need thickener where apparently they toss it in just for the hell of it) because it's cheap.  It is also known to cause stomach issues in sensitive people, particularly those with IBS, and it can cause MSG-related reactions.  So if you know somebody sensitive to MSG, the whipping cream will turn your icing into something just as potentially problematic as the store-bought kind.  Since I know people with both issues, big no-no.

All potential problems avoided, however, and you have an incredibly rich and easy dessert.  Very tasty for a very minimal amount of effort.  Pardon the blurry picture but I did get better with the camera as I went.  Oddly enough the inside of our fridge is not an optimal photo studio.  Until next time, insert witty cooking catchphrase here!