Chocolate Chip Cake Bars with a Salted Chocolate Glaze

Chocolate Chip Cake Bars with Salted Chocolate Glaze.

January 18, 2011

If you’ve been hanging ’round these parts for a while, you know there are an abundance of the following items in our house: chicken, steak, chocolate, bacon, rice, chicken and more chicken. And chocolate chip cookies.

If Mr. How Sweet could eat one food for the rest of his life, it would probably be steak. But if he was granted a second choice, he would wash that steak down with chocolate chip cookies.

And if he was really lucky, he’d stand over the sink shoveling said cookies in his mouth and drinking Diet Coke.

But there are only so many cookies a girl can eat. And trust me, I can eat a lot of cookies.

So I decided to shake things up a bit… but take it slowly. After all, I didn’t need any tantrums. How about presenting Mr. How Sweet with a cake that tasted like a chocolate chip cookie?

With a bit of a salty glaze. Because if there is anything I love more than chocolate and peanut butter, it’s chocolate and sea salt.

Which probably explains why I chased a Snickers bar with three Pringles in my younger years. Courtesy of Mother Lovett’s snack cupboard of course. I started early.

I asked Mr. How Sweet how he felt about the cake bars, and he threw out a few “happy” obscenities that just aren’t appropriate for this family friendly blog. But he did say that they don’t really taste like cake, since he doesn’t love cake. And they obviously aren’t cookies… but they are gooey, almost pastry-like… and really, really delicious.

And they must have been great, because at 10 o’clock on Saturday night, they were gone. Like… completely gone. A mere 10 hours since I had first baked them. We had no guests. We don’t have pets. I guess we just have bottomless pits?

At least I can blame Mr. How Sweet on this one.

Chocolate Chip Cake Bars

slightly adapted from allrecipes

6 tablespoons butter, softened

3/4 cup packed brown sugar

1/2 cup white sugar

3 eggs

2 1/4 cups all purpose flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

1 cup milk (I used vanilla almond milk)

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

1 cup chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350.

Cream butter and sugars in the bowl and of electric mixer. Add vanilla, and add eggs one at a time. In separate bowl, mix flour, baking powder and salt. Add half of the dry ingredients to the butter mixture, alternating with the milk and ending with the dry ingredients. Toss chocolate chips with a tiny bit of flour and them fold them into the batter.

Spray a 13 x 9 cake pan (or baking dish) with non-stick spray. Layer with parchment paper and spray again. Pour batter in pan and spread evenly. Bake for 35-45 minutes, or until knife inserted in middle comes out clean.

Salted Chocolate Glaze

8 ounce high-quality chocolate

1/4 teaspoon sea salt (or more if you’d like)

Melt chocolate in a double boiled or in the microwave (in 30 second increments). Stir in sea salt. Pour over chocolate chip cake.