Magic Cookie Bars
Seven layers, no mixing bowl: buttery crumb base, condensed milk, chocolate, butterscotch, coconut and pecans, pressed down and baked into one chewy slab. The magic is that the condensed milk turns to caramel around everything else.
Photograph credit: Layered bar by ChildofMidnight at English Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons · this resized copy is shared under the same licence
Where This Goes Wrong
Press the base hard. A loose base is the difference between a bar and a pile of crumbs.
Cut them small. This is a very sweet bake and a 5 cm square is a portion.
Swap the pecans for salted peanuts if you want the sweetness cut harder.
How to Make Magic Cookie Bars
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Heat the oven to 175°C / 350°F and line a 23 x 33 cm tin with baking paper.
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Pour the melted butter into the tin, add the crumbs and salt, and mix them together with your fingers right in the tin. Press flat and firm.
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Scatter the chocolate chips evenly, then the butterscotch chips.
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Scatter the coconut, then the pecans, and press the whole thing down gently with your palms.
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Pour the condensed milk over in a slow zigzag, covering as much of the surface as you can. Do not stir.
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Bake 25 to 30 minutes, until the edges are deep golden and bubbling and the centre is set and lightly browned.
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Scatter with flaky salt and cool completely in the tin, then refrigerate 2 hours before cutting — warm bars fall apart and cold ones cut cleanly.
Related guides: Prep, cook and total time · Pan and tin size.
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What's Going On Here
Sweetened condensed milk is sugar and milk protein with most of the water already removed, so in a hot oven it does in twenty minutes what a caramel takes on the hob: the sugars caramelise and the proteins brown together. Pouring it over dry layers rather than stirring it through means it seeps down and sets each layer in place, which is why these hold together in the hand. Toasting the coconut and pecans is the one step people skip and the one that keeps the top from tasting merely sweet.
Storage and Reheating
Airtight at room temperature for 5 days, or refrigerated for 2 weeks. Freeze cut bars for 3 months.
What to Serve Alongside
- Black coffee
- Cold milk
- Vanilla ice cream
Questions and Answers
How long does Magic Cookie Bars take to make?
15 minutes of preparation and 28 minutes of cooking, plus 2 hours of chilling, so allow 2 hours 43 minutes from start to finish. The method also needs time for cooling completely, which it does not time, so treat that as a minimum. The recipe serves 16.
Magic Cookie Bars Nutrition
Per serving, calculated from the ingredient list with USDA FoodData Central figures (SR Legacy). A calculation, not a laboratory analysis: brands, cuts and how you measure change the real numbers. Garnishes, greasing and other items with no amount are not counted. How the figures are worked out.
Your notes on this recipe
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Compiled by Turab
Checked by script for timings, diet labels and nutrition arithmetic. How the recipes are checked. Found a mistake? Tell us.
First published ; last changed .
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