"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.