"Mint to be" bars

Though I honestly think I am one of the luckiest people in the world in terms of the wonderful opportunities and people in the world around me, I have to admit that this winter has been a series of unfortunate health mishaps- from a season-ending injury last fall to a nasty flu to my most recent diagnosis of mono, nothing has really gone to plan. After my poor mono-infected body lay on the couch eating nothing but soup, barely having the energy to walk across the room to get my computer charger for an entire week, I finally started feeling better this past friday.

To celebrate my regained energy and desire to eat food (I do find this a reason to celebrate) I decided I had to bake sometime.  During my sloth-week, I also spent an inordinate amount of time on Pinterest.  bot only did I rename and reorganize my boards but also I pinned a whole plethora of new desserts to make when I finally felt up to it.  One of such desserts were Loaded M&M Oreo bars.  The pictures looked amazzzzzing and I had most of the ingredients.  These two things made me to decide to go for it on Friday afternoon, aka the first day I had been outside in over a week.

 I decided to put a little spin on it and go with a mint theme: T-1 month before St.Patty's day, right? Also I would like to commemorate my current favorite TV show "Grey's Anatomy" (which returns this week yahoo!!) by calling these "Mint to be" bars- thank you April Kepner (I'm totally team Jackson for those that care/understand).  Though having mono is definitely NOT how I envisioned the winter of my senior year, I am hoping that something good will come out of being able to relax a bit- meaning, everything that has happened was "mint to be".  I know that is cheesy but despite hours on the pinterest humor board I cannot think of anything better and I am just SO excited for Grey's this week.  On to the recipe:


1/2 cup unsalted melter butter
1 large egg
1 cup dark brown sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1 cup cake flour
18 Mint Cream Oreos
1/2 cup green and brown M&M's (yes, I picked them out)
8 mini-york patties

1. preheat oven to 350F
2. melt butter and add to large bowl
3. add egg, sugar and vanilla
4. add flour until combined
5. put Oreos and plastic bag and crush up
6. add Oreos to batter (I found that this mixture pretty much looked like some gross pesto mixture- though I agree "gross" and "pesto" should never go in the same sentence)
7. spread batter in 8 by 8 pan (I used by new brownie pan that had individual brownie squares and filled 9 of them)
8. cut up york patties and sprinkle on top
9.  sprinkle M&Ms on top
10.  bake for 15-22 minutes depending on type of pan (I did only 15)


Taking these out of the oven, I was a bit skeptical at the first glance.  I have some impatience issues sometimes, especially when I suspect something I've made has turned out a bit questionable,  so decided to scrap a little crumb off one of the top bars.  Examining the little crumb, I realized that York patties look like a gross, snotty white mess when melted.  This didn't stop me from putting it in my mouth however, since york patties in any form are delicious .  As I ate it, the gooey,white melted York cream mess crystalized suddenly and turned into pure sugar, sort of like some chemistry experiment I did in high school when we learned about supersaturation.  So basically my bars transcended some weird law of matter and taught me that the cream in York patties is supersaturated with sugar..... neither of which is a bad thing.  Though to anyone making this recipe I would probably recommend sprinkling the york patties on AFTER baking. Not that chemistry isn't exciting.

On a side note, all of my doubts I had about my brownie pan making overly hard and underly chewy/gooey brownies were alleviated when I realized these were cooked PERFECTLY.  Slightly crisp around the edges but just so so soft, chocolatey and minty in the middle. soooooo good.  My housemate and I did some serious work of these in an embarrassingly short amount of time.  We decided to leave the last two for our other two housemates, which ended up being a struggle of will. Our thought process- we could just finish them off now and they would never know about them....Unless they read my blog...... then it would be awkward.  So we resisted and let everyone in the Alice Palace taste the magic.  

The Hy(bread)

When reflecting on the different bread products I have made and written about, I realized that I have pretty much run the gamut on pretty much every type- bagels, muffins, bread, rolls, pretzels, corn bread, english muffins, calzones, scones and so on.  So when I finally finished my midterms this past week and was determined to bake something, I needed to come up with someone new to avoid sounding too repetitive.  Basically my baking falls into two categories: 1) over-the-top desserts (aka cookie dough, cheese cake, oreo, reese's peanut cup stuffed goodness) 2) or things I make with flour, yeast and water.  Since I am in the middle of my running season, I try to avoid numero uno unless I have a really good excuse or a really large group of people to distribute them to.  I sadly did not have that type of excuse this weekend so I had to settle with making some yeast product.  

A side note on yeast; I realized that the expiration date on a jar of yeast is only for an UNOPENED jar of yeast.  That would have been nice to know about a year an a half ago as I continued to use my two year old jar of yeast! I have had some failed yeast bread attempts and now I probably know why:  unhappy yeast that was probably over the hill. Apparently yeast jars should not be used longer than 6 months.  I thought I was being thrifty by getting the big jar of yeast but apparently not since I could not have possibly used it in 6 months unless I baked every day.  Anyone who can do that either 1) owns a bakery 2) has a lot more free time on their hands than I do. 

Anyways, in my attempt to come up with a unique product, I settled on English Muffin Bread.  My very strong ambitions to bake emerged fairly late last night so I did not have time to do a long-rise product.  I did find a fairly quick recipe for english muffin bread.  I like english muffins.... and bread... so why not give it a try to combine the two? I used the following recipes with no modification, except that I used my mini-loaf pan instead of the 8by4 pan (only have a 9 by 5 and didn't want to get flatbread!). http://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/english-muffin-bread-2

My fresh, young and energetic yeast was also very happy and decided to actually make my bread double (usually I am overly optimistic about my bread's progress.... it's risen a little bit... right???? This time I had no doubt). I also actually measured the temperature of the milk/water mixture to make certain that I don't scald the yeast to death at such a young age :)  I did adjust the baking time a bit to only 30 minutes since I was using my mini-loaf pan.   The result was pretty much as expected, english muffin and loaf form.  Add some butter and honey to a nice toasted slice to complete a wonderful side to a nutritious breakfast (or dinner like I did!).