Cooking For Pleasure: Mary’s extreme bars

For at least 20 years, my sister Mary Watson has been making these cookies frequently, especially for her piano music recitals and music history classes. Because of the variety of dried fruits and nuts, these are also a great energy bar for hiking and fishing. They are easy to make and the recipe can doubled. The nuts and dried fruits can have some substitutions, but I recommend you try the original recipe first. Mary calls them extreme bars because the ingredients are so rich. The baked bars look a bit like Renaissance jewels because of the different colors of the fruit and nuts.

Shortbread crust:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Mix well: ½ cup unsalted butter with

½ cup granulated sugar

Add:

1 cup all-purpose flour

Zest from one orange

½ tsp almond extract

Mix well and press into an 8-inch square pan generously lined with parchment paper.

Bake for 10 or 12 minutes until dough is set

Topping

While the crust is baking, mix:

2 cups of dried mixed fruit (apricots, cherries, dates are used here)

2 cups of coarsely chopped mixed UNSALTED nuts: pecans, blanched almonds, hazelnuts and cashews (Use several kinds of nuts but decide for yourself what you would like. Macadamia nuts and/or pine nuts could be also used. Your decision.}

½ cup flaked coconut

2/3 cup brown sugar, packed

2 eggs

½ tsp baking powder

1 tablespoon flour

½ tsp salt

1 teaspoon vanilla

Spread topping onto shortbread crust and bake for 18-22 minutes until bubbly.

Cool on rack. Lift cookie bar out of pan using the parchment paper as a handle. When cool, cut into one-inch squares. Cut cookies are small but very rich. Mary says “Don’t eat these if you are dieting!”

• Patty Schied is a longtime Juneau resident who studied at the Cordon Bleu in London, has cooked meals for both AWARE and the Glory Hall, and has written a cookbook. Cooking For Pleasure appears every other week in Capital City Weekly.