Baking Chez Moi: Crispy-Topped Brown Sugar Bars

Now we're talking! A chewy brown sugar cookie base, covered by a layer of partially melted Ghirardelli bittersweet chocolate, topped with boozy-caramelized Rice Krispies. Dorie's friend says they are Rice Krispies Treats born in France. Mine are Rice Krispies Treats tipsy on Tuaca.

In Baking Chez Moi (p. 325), there is a gorgeous photo of one of these bars in a bowl, nestled up to a scoop of vanilla ice cream, with a few random Krispies trekking across the frozen tundra. As I was pressing the brown-sugar cookie dough into the 8-inch square pan, trying to make it stretch enough to cover the bottom, I was thinking to myself that this is going to be an extremely thin base. Although I suspected the base would spread like cookies do during baking, I made a last minute decision to switch to a a 9 x 4-inch loaf pan. The bars are supposed to be "supermodel skinny" but I liked the way they turned out, with a few extra curves...

The Tuaca idea came from a version of Rice Krispie Treats I've made before, with coarsely chopped dark chocolate, almonds, and Amaretto liqueur. I didn't have any Amaretto, so I added a splash of Tuaca to the sizzling caramel before folding in the Rice Krispies.

Loved these!

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Tuesdays with Dorie is an online cooking group where anyone can bake along. The group bakes from two books – Baking with Julia and Baking Chez Moi. I bake along with the Baking Chez Moi group. We bake two recipes per month (voted on by the members in advance) and post on the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month. We are asked to refrain from including the actual recipe in our posts, to promote the publishing industry and encourage others to buy the cookbooks.