Cookies and Candids

Vegan candy bars are often hard to find. Tara and I really wanted to make something that would fulfill our sweet/salty/chocolate/chewy/crunchy needs, so we thought a lot about how to create those flavors all in one candy confection. Though small, these candy bars packed a punch, and definitely were worth all the work we went through to put them together! Next time, I will try to find a mold in the shape of a rectangular chocolate bar, so that our finished product looks more smooth and precise. However, the handmade shapes we created were fun and original, even if somewhat gloopy.

We made two types of candy bars. We had gone through all combinations of flavors, and drawn out diagrams of how each candy bar would be built. Some were simple, others were incredibly complex with layers and layers of wafery-thin cookies and balls of peanut butter and some sort of vegan nougat that we never quite figured out how to make. Eventually we abandoned these complex plans and decided to fulfill our intense Snickers needs…One of our candy bars started this way, and so it had a home-made shortbread cookie bottom with gooey caramel and salty peanut filling layered on top. We covered the whole thing in dark chocolate. After the chocolate set and hardened, it had a great crispy outside shell and the caramel was nicely stringy and chewy. The salty-caramel combination was devine!

Our second type of bar was also delicious. We sandwiched layers of almond marzipan, dried cranberries, and pistachios between two thin shortbread cookies, and covered the entire sandwich with rice-milk based white chocolate. Drizzled with dark chocolate and sprinkled with pistachio pieces, this was a sweet confection that blew my taste buds, and was very pretty! Each bite made me want more.