Cookbook Chronicles: Brownie S'mores Bars

Cookbook Chronicles is an on-going series at The Bookery. Over the course of the next year, we'll delve into The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond’s, cookbook, Super Easy! trying one recipe per month.

The recipe: S'mores Brownie Bars

The cookbook: Super Easy! by Ree Drummond

No photo of the actual dessert because it looked awful!

The details: What says fall more than s'mores? For me, fall is the prime season for bonfires, toasted marshmallows and s'mores-influenced desserts.

So when I was considering our October Cookbook Chronicles recipe, this one jumped out at me. What’s not to love? These bars are a combination of brownies and marshmallow fluff, topped with crushed graham crackers and chocolate bar pieces. What’s not to love?

The adjustments: For once in my life, I made a recipe with no adjustments. I followed this one to a T, except for one thing: I probably wasn’t as attentive as I should have been when the marshmallow topping was toasting.

The verdict: I so wanted this one to be a win, but it was a massive kitchen fail. My brownie s'mores bars were hard and so sticky I warned my guests they’d pull the fillings out of their teeth. I don’t know what the issue was, but I can hazard a few guesses:

1. I was making this dessert while also trying to make the entrees for a dinner I was hosting at my house. We were having a couple different kinds of baked pastas and I wanted to prep them the day before and also bake the dessert, so while I was making meat sauce and white sauce for my lasagna, I was also trying to make these dessert bars. And at one point (after adding the marshmallows to toast) I forgot about them completely and definitely baked them a smidge too long.

2. I skimped and bought the store brand marshmallow fluff. I am not a brand name snob on most products, but this marshmallow fluff didn’t impress me much with texture and flavor when I opened the container, so I don’t know why I expected it to magically transform into something wonderful in this recipe.

Besides the issues that likely contributed to this recipe failure, I did expect the brownies to taste more like s'mores, but somehow in all of the ingredients, the graham cracker pieces and flavor got a little lost. I should definitely give this recipe another try, just to be fair, but I don’t know that I liked it enough to go through all of the trouble of buying all the ingredients and following numerous steps to make it happen!

Up next: Crunchy Breakfast Wraps

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