Butterfinger Bark

I'm always on the lookout for desserts and treats that are non-dairy, or can easily be made non-dairy without resorting to the yucky substitutes. The recipe for butterfinger bark from Cookies and Cups fit the bill, and seemed easy enough to have the 3-year-old "help" with.

I pinned this photo:

The recipe calls for melting chocolate and putting half of it on a foil-lined sheet to cool. Then melting some candy corn, mixing with peanut butter, and spreading atop the chocolate. Cool again, and top with remaining chocolate. Sounds easy! I used dairy-free chocolate chips, which taste as good as the regular semi-sweet kind.

And it was indeed easy. Everything came together just as described (I only made 1/4 of a recipe).

It was easy and we had a blast making it. However....

Something went dreadfully wrong. The taste was great - JUST like a Butterfinger - but the texture was... not successful. The texture of the butterfinger part was somewhere between beef jerky and stale taffy.

I couldn't even cut it with my giant butcher knife. I had to bend it till finally it would snap. And because the chocolate was much softer, it peeled off the filling and then melted in your hands as you were trying to gnaw your way through. Resulting in:

... a mess. It tasted good enough that we eventually ate the whole batch, but this isn't something I'd make again. And definitely not for gifts or cookie exchange.

I'm not sure what went wrong. It could be that I heated the candy corn too much, or that my "natural" peanut butter was missing something. Who knows.

Verdict: Fail. It doesn't matter how good it tastes if you can't chew it.

Pancake Muffins

This pancake bites recipe comes from The World According to Eggface.

Basically, you throw together your favorite pancake recipe (mine is temporarily dairy-free), then bake it in muffin tins instead of frying on the stovetop.

I feared that this might result in muffin tins filled with stuck-on pancake batter. But I hate standing at the stove for 40 minutes flipping flapjacks. So I forged ahead.

Uncooked, the pancakes looked like this:

I just sprinkled on some wild blueberries I had in the freezer, and some chopped walnuts. The recipe calls for baking 15 minutes at 350 degrees.

My preferred bacon method is baking, and it seems to take about 20-25 minutes at 350 degrees. So I had put the bacon in about 10 minutes earlier, then popped these in.

Then I went and finished my coffee on the couch. WAY easier than standing over a skillet.

They came right out of the pan, no sticking problems at all. And they were fantastic. Really delicious, and not at all heavy or greasy. This has become our go-to pancake method, the guys love it. It works perfectly with baked bacon.

 
The one change I've since made is to pour in some batter, then put in the add-ins, then pour more batter over. It puts the fruit more in the middle of the muffin.

Verdict: Perfect! Why haven't I been doing this all these years?