Passover Coconut Macaroon Twix Bars

Do you sometimes struggle with making delicious desserts for Passover? Do the holiday restrictions make it challenging to let your dessert creations really shine? Have you ever wanted to make a kosher for Passover dessert that is both delicious and ridiculous? Well, look no further! Your prayers have been answered.

Yes, I realize Passover is long over at this point, but as you may know, I often bake things several weeks in advance of when I write about them. If you read about it now, you can make it next year! Or you can make it as an anytime dessert, and not worry about it being kosher for Passover.

I wanted to make a dessert for Passover this year, and I remembered that last year I had found a bunch of recipes. So I looked through my bunch and decided on this one. It didn’t look too bad up front, but it’s not an insignificant amount of work. (Btw, there are great pictures and instructions in the original recipe to guide you through!)

I made this recipe parve, meaning it doesn’t contain milk or meat products. We normally have meat at the Passover meal, so I wanted it to be parve. (For a good overview of what all of this kosher talk means, check out my Passover recipe from last year.) This means I had to find non-dairy ingredients: margarine, caramel, chocolate. When you look at ingredient lists, you’d be surprised at what finds its way into different products. One thing that made it simpler than last year was a new ruling on kitniyot. Okay, granted I don’t keep up on religious news, but this came as quite a surprise. I had already been moving away from observing the kitniyot restrictions personally, but in trying to make a recipe that was considerate of my family, I was going to honor those rules. Now, I didn’t have to.

Macaroon mixture.

Some ingredient notes: I had some matzah cake meal left from last year. The box had two separate envelopes and I still had one left, so it was good to use. The recipe also called for baking powder. It might seem against the spirit of the holiday, but the research I did said that it was okay to use. The one I used had cornstarch in it (who knew), but the aforementioned ruling on kitniyot made that irrelevant. I used liquid egg whites. At a health food store, I found pre-made caramel sauce and mini chocolate chips which were non-dairy. (The mini chocolate chips were also adorable.)

Shortbread, ready to cook.

I used my BFF the KitchenAid to mix the shortbread dough together. I skipped the kneading part and just mixed it. (Was that a mistake?) I measured the dough out. It looked like 1/4 inch to me. I wrapped it and stuck it in the freezer.

First batch of macaroons, ready to bake.

I setup a double boiler. I can’t remember when/if I’ve done one before. Some recipes call for one for melting chocolate, but I just do that in the microwave. It was fun. I used my new whisk for the first time. I had gotten one because a lot of recipes called for whisking the ingredients. I had generally been ignoring that, and just mixing or stirring. But I figured it was important with the egg whites. It turns out whisking is fun, too. I had to hold the bowl with one hand and whisk with the other to keep the bowl from sliding. The sugar dissolved pretty quickly.

Baked shortbread.

I took the shortbread out of the freezer, and that’s when the fun problems started. We have maybe the world’s smallest freezer, so I had to really move things around to make room. (How small is it? It’s so small, the ice cubes complain that it’s crowded. Actually, there’s so little room, we generally don’t have ice in there.) It was hard to set up a flat surface for it, so I did the best I could. Unfortunately, it was a little uneven and froze in that shape. When I tried to flatten it out, it broke in places. I was able to smoosh some of it back together as I was cutting it and it got closer to room temperature, but it was still a little bit of a mess. Interestingly, it smelled kinda like charoses. Maybe it was the cinnamon and honey?

Second batch of macaroons, ready to bake.

So, I cut the shortbread. As I mentioned, it broke in places, but it was otherwise okay. I measured out what I thought should be the right size for the first few, and then kinda guessed my way through the rest. They were close, but some were clearly bigger and some were clearly smaller. I think that was okay though, as some people like bigger cookies, and some like smaller. I managed to line them all up on one baking sheet.

First batch of macaroons, baked.

The recipe said to cook the shortbread and macaroons together, but I had the shortbread all ready and the oven had just finished preheating, so I figured I would bake the shortbread while I worked on the macaroons.

They were a little too small, and some got overcooked.

I made the macaroons while the shortbread was baking. They were very big compared to the shortbread, but I figured I would cut them down as suggested. Like the shortbread, some were bigger, some were smaller. When I baked them, some of the smaller ones got overcooked.

The second batch turned out better.

I let everything cool. I then attached the macaroons to the shortbread. I covered the shortbread with the caramel as instructed. I tried to cut down the macaroons, as they were way too big, but they didn’t cut so well. (Maybe I needed a better knife?) Instead of cutting cleanly, they kinda got ripped apart. It was a mess. And it took a while to get them all down to the right size. I did some matchmaking, trying to match them to similar sized shortbread. Towards the end, I realized that I could just cut them in half and they would still be a good size for the shortbread. Afterwards, I had a big ol’ pile of macaroon pieces.

Second batch close-up!

Eventually, I got the macaroons all cut down and attached. They were not very elegant. They were very lumpy and big and uneven which made the next part a little challenging.

Everything ready to go!

I melted the chocolate. Easy. I tried dipping the shortbread/macaroon combo into the chocolate. Not as easy. I wanted the chocolate to cover them completely. But it was hard to get the chocolate to fill in all the nooks and crannies of the oddly shaped cookies, which meant dipping and then spooning the chocolate several times. And then it was hard to get them back out without getting chocolate everywhere. (Maybe some kind of tool would have helped?) It was a mess.

The caramel is applied.

I went through a lot of chocolate. I finished up all the chocolate I had bought for the recipe, which I thought would have been more than enough. Luckily I had enough other chocolate around to get through it all. I think the macaroons being big, trying to fill in all the nooks and crannies, and it being messy removing them from the chocolate all contributed to using a lot of chocolate. But finally I was able to cover them all. I cleared out room in the fridge and let them chill overnight.

And the macaroons are attached.

My wife and I tried one and left the rest to chill (because they would have to be transported). They were good. The shortbread was okay, but it was clearly not regular shortbread. You could definitely taste the matzoh meal. The macaroon was good. The caramel was not super prominent. The chocolate was, well, chocolate. All in all it was good.

I put the cookies in plastic containers for the trip to Pennsylvania to celebrate Passover with my family. They traveled well. (No fights with the other passengers.) Once there, I put them in the freezer to chill until Passover. I had gotten there early to help my mom with cooking as I usually do. (It’s a big meal and requires a lot of preparation.) But I also got in extra early to go through family photos as part of my project to document all of our photo albums.

Aren’t these the cutest little chocolate chips ever?

On the night of the seder, I took them out of the freezer so they could get closer to room temperature before we ate dessert. They were a mouthful, in more ways than one. It was a challenge just explaining them to people. If they knew what a Twix bar was, that was easy. Otherwise I described it as shortbread topped with caramel and a macaroon, and then covered in chocolate.

Dipped!

They went over well. People were really impressed and enjoyed them. Even a couple of people who don’t like coconut were won over by them. The recipe had made a bunch, but there was no problem with giving away the leftovers. They went quickly.

And chilled.

In retrospect, it was a much lengthier process than I had imagined. Between the shortbread getting messed up in the freezer, the macaroons being difficult to trim down, and the chocolate dipping taking a while and being a mess, it was a lot. I was up much later than I thought making them. Now don’t get me wrong, they were good, just a lot of work. Next time I think I’ll aim for something a little simpler. 😉

If you try them, let me know how they turn out for you. And if you have any special Passover dessert recipes that have worked well for you, I’d love to hear those as well.

Recipe courtesy of Kitchen Tested.

Millionaire’s Shortbread – Vegan Passover Edition

Happy Passover and Happy Easter everyone!

I know you were all looking forward to the follow-up to last week’s sweet potato cheesecake recipe to find out what I did with all the extra filling. That will be coming next week. I bumped it a week so I could bring you this post. It’s one I wanted to bring you in a timely fashion, while it was still, you know, timely.

In honor of it being Passover, I wanted to share with you a recipe specifically made for the holiday. For those of you who don’t know, Passover is a Jewish holiday that brings particular challenges when baking. You’re not supposed to eat bread, use wheat flour or leavening, as well as other restrictions depending on your beliefs. I only sometimes keep to these traditions. However, since I love a good challenge when I bake, I thought I would bake a dessert appropriate for the holiday.

To start with I did some research, and I was pleasantly surprised by what I found. Growing up there didn’t seem to be a lot of choices, but when I looked now, I found a bunch of good recipes. There were some flourless chocolate cakes, lots of recipes with nuts, and all sorts of other interesting things. And after looking through them all, I had a brainstorm. Instead of using a new recipe, why not try to adapt an existing recipe to make it Passover friendly?

I decided on my (maybe one day) world-famous millionaire’s shortbread. There are lots of recipes out there that use matzah meal. (Matzah is unleavened bread eaten on Passover. Matzah meal is matzah which is ground up and used like flour.) After some further digging around, I found a matzah meal shortbread recipe.

But I wasn’t out of the woods yet. To further complicate things, I decided to make it parve. That is to say, without meat or milk products. This way it would be kosher (in accordance with the Jewish dietary rules) regardless of what the meal was. (Kosher rules are complicated. A good overview is here.) I don’t normally keep kosher, but I figured that as long as I was making it kosher for Passover, I might as well make it kosher all around.

That meant finding a non-dairy substitute for the butter (margarine) and the sweetened condensed milk (coconut milk), as well as using dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate. No problem. (I did that for the vegan version I made before.) But Passover complicates it again. Depending on your traditions (and believe me there are many), other items are also not allowed. Corn and beans are not allowed by traditions that my family generally follows. So that meant going without the corn syrup, which is something I’ve been considering anyway. But many of the butter alternatives have soybean oil in them. The one I ended up going with was Earth Balance coconut spread. I looked at the ingredients, and it looked okay to me. (I welcome any comments if I missed something.)

I made a couple of other substitutions. I used applesauce instead of an egg. Mainly I did it so I wouldn’t have to get a whole container of eggs just so I could use one. But it also had the added benefit of making the recipe vegan. (Shortbread doesn’t normally have eggs, but my guess is it was added to compensate for the dryness of the matzah meal.) Another substitution I made was using matzah cake meal instead of matzah meal. It was what they had at the store. And while I had never heard of it before this year, it turned up in a lot of recipes I found. It turns out it’s finer than matzah meal, which seemed like a good thing.

At first, I made only the shortbread to see how it would work out. I figured if that worked, it would be okay, as I had done the rest before. The recipe I found was from Australia. It called for a lamington tin. I’m assuming that’s common in Australia, but I had never heard of it. Thanks to the Internet, I found out that it’s roughly the same as a 9 x 13 dish. (Thank you internet!) The recipe also said to cook at 350° C. I know they use Celsius there, but that’s ridiculously hot. No cookies I know of would be happy at that temperature, so I had to assume they meant 350° F.

The dough.

Before I put the shortbread together, I lined a 9 x 13 dish with parchment paper. I solved the issue of the paper not staying put by using pie weights. (Take that parchment paper!) While I was putting it together, I broke my own bowl rule and got a bowl that was too small. The bowl I started with was dishwasher safe and I was trying to save on cleanup. But I had to go to a bigger bowl anyway. That was mostly because I used a mixer. I don’t normally for shortbread, but I was making enough substitutions in this, so I thought it would be best to do as much as I could of what the recipe said. The dough mixed up well and the texture looked right. I put it into the dish and used my hands to press it into shape. I baked it for 30 minutes at 350° F.

It smelled good while baking. And 30 minutes was just the right amount of time. It was nice and golden around the edges, but otherwise roughly the same color (which was a little darker than shortbread normally looks thanks to the color of the “flour”). It smelled a little like matzah, a little like coconut. I tried a few bits around the edges to see how it was, because I wanted to make sure the shortbread was okay before proceeding. It tasted good. Phew! I let it cool. I had to go out anyway, so I left the rest to do at another time.

The shortbread.

When I returned to work on it, I made the caramel. I basically followed the details from the vegan version I had made. I originally thought I was doing one and a half times my regular recipe because of the size of the shortbread. But then I realized it was about double. I had enough butter substitute and brown sugar, but I was a little short on the coconut milk (3 1/2 cups instead of 4). I used the same Earth Balance coconut spread as in the shortbread, good old regular brown sugar, and Goya coconut milk. I also omitted the corn syrup.

I’m not surprised it smelled like coconut while making it. I was using coconut instead of butter and milk. It took about an hour to make. I was prepared for that, as it took a while last time I used coconut milk. I was able to do it at a reasonable heat, and it didn’t bubble up too much. I tasted a little bit. It was not the best tasting caramel I ever made, but it was okay. I poured it over the shortbread and used a spatula to smooth it out.

The shortbread with caramel.

Next step, the chocolate. Easy, except for one thing. I didn’t have enough cause I was making a double recipe. I thought I had some extra chocolate around that was suitable, but I didn’t. So I put the shortbread/caramel away in the fridge.

I picked up some chocolate while I was out the next day. It wasn’t as easy as I thought. Finding dark chocolate was easy, but finding dark chocolate that didn’t have soy (soy lecithin, an emulsifier, was in a bunch of them) or that wasn’t made on equipment that also processed wheat or milk products, was much harder. (As I said, lots of rules.) I ended up with half really nice chocolate (Green & Black’s) that I had already purchased, and half what I managed to find at Duane Reade, which was store brand, but seemed decent.

I now had 400 grams of chocolate. I only needed 380. So I broke off what I needed and melted it in the microwave. I pulled the shortbread covered in caramel out of the fridge and poured the chocolate over it. I used a spoon to spread it around evenly. I did the little cleanup I needed and by that time the chocolate was already mostly cooled, as the shortbread/caramel was pretty cold. I put it in the fridge to finish setting.

With chocolate, before setting completely.

After the chocolate set.

And now for the 64 million(aire) dollar question. How did it work out? First impression: not the best millionaire’s shortbread I’ve ever made. But I’m kinda impressed it worked at all given the restrictions. The shortbread was okay, but a little dry and crumbly, not soft and a little crumbly like shortbread should be. Maybe it should have been cooked a little less? Maybe it already dried out? Or maybe that’s the way the (shortbread) cookie crumbles given the ingredients.

The caramel tasted kinda like caramel. In some bites, it didn’t taste much like caramel, but in some bites it totally did. The caramel also tasted a little bit like coconut. It wasn’t overpowering, but it was noticeable. The chocolate itself was fine. Nothing special, just decent chocolate.

Sideshow.

By the way, this was one of the messier ones to cut. I figured out where I wanted to cut the chocolate, and cut notches in it to mark the spots. But when I went to cut, the chocolate broke where it wanted to break, not where I wanted to cut it. I tried to pre-cut some of the lines to see if that would help, but it didn’t. I thought maybe if the chocolate cooled, it would be easier. It wasn’t. It still broke apart, with the added issue that the caramel was also oozing. So it wasn’t the prettiest looking shortbread, but it finally got cut. I cut it 6 by 9 to end up with 54 cookies. I brought 36 of the nicest looking ones to the seder that my parents were hosting.

Close-up.

What did others think of them? I may have been a little bit too harsh on myself. Everyone enjoyed them. Some people thought they were good. Some people thought they were great. Even some people who weren’t keeping kosher for Passover tried them and liked them. So I guess they turned out better than I thought.

One other thing I’ll mention is that they are a little meltier than usual. The chocolate and shortbread are fine, but the caramel melts more quickly. The caramel doesn’t melt completely, but it starts to ooze, and the cookies fall apart because the caramel is in the middle. It’s best to keep these refrigerated and bring them out a little bit before you’re going to eat them.

Hanging out at the party.

So now that you’ve heard my tale of Passover baking, I’d love to hear yours. What did you bake? Was it a Passover original or an adaptation of a non-Passover recipe? How did it turn out? And if you get a chance to try this recipe, I’d love to hear about that too. Let me know in the comments below.

Normally this is where I would just link to the original recipe. But since this is a frankenstein of three different recipes, and I’ve made a lot of changes, I think it’s best to write it all out and link to the sources.

Original Matzah Shortbread recipe courtesy of Solomon’s. Original Vegan Millionaire’s Shortbread recipe courtesy of The Every Day Veggie. Original Millionaire’s Shortbread recipe courtesy of Allrecipes.com. (Also thank you to Allrecipes.com for the cup to gram conversions I used.)

Ingredients:

For the shortbread:

200g Earth Balance coconut spread

201g sugar

1/3 cup applesauce

2 cups matzah cake meal

For the caramel:

227g Earth Balance coconut spread

220g brown sugar

4 cups coconut milk (I only used 3 1/2, but it should be 4)

For the chocolate topping:

380 grams dark chocolate

Instructions:

To make the shortbread, use a mixer to mix together the coconut spread and sugar until the mixture is light and fluffy. Mix in the applesauce. Stir in the matzah cake meal until combined. Line a 9 x 13 baking dish with parchment paper. Spread evenly into the bottom of the dish. Bake at 350° for 30 minutes.

To make the caramel, add the coconut spread, brown sugar, and coconut milk into a saucepan. Cook until it’s boiling. Then reduce heat to medium and stir. Keep stirring till it thickens into caramel. (For me that was about 1 hour. YMMV.) Pour over the shortbread and spread evenly.

To make the chocolate topping, break the chocolate into small pieces and put into a microwave safe dish. Microwave for 1 minute and stir. Keep microwaving it in 30 second intervals, stirring in between, until it’s smooth. Pour over the caramel, and spread evenly.

Chill until firm. Remove from dish, peel away parchment paper, and cut into squares. Enjoy!