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.

Avalanche (Mudslide?) Bars

Cookies and Cups has a recipe for no-bake Avalanche Bars that's from 2010 but has been pinned a bunch recently.

It's pretty simple: melt white chocolate chips with peanut butter, stir in rice crispies, marshmallows, and some regular chocolate mini-chips, press into a pan. Cool them, then cut and eat.

We're temporarily dairy-free, so I swapped out the white chocolate chips and mini-chips for these:

I think you could use any kind of semi-sweet to sweet chocolate or peanut butter chip.

The recipe came together really quickly. The entire process took about 15 minutes. I didn't mess around with 50% power on the microwave to melt the chips, just used 30 second increments. This is what it looked like after all the ingredients were added:

It didn't need to cool for long. 20 minutes and it was pretty set. The bars were absolutely delicious. They have a light, airy texture and intense chocolate taste.

The recipe says to avoid pressing down too hard when you put them in the pan, in case they get hard. I put a lightly greased sheet of tin foil on top and pressed gently. I think I'll press harder next time, they were almost too delicate and fell apart easily.

Verdict: Insanely delicious. 36 hours later and my husband and I had eaten the whole batch (slightly embarrassing). These are the rare dairy-free treat that's actually good in its own right, and not just "not bad for non-dairy."