Sprung At Last

  • The Divorce
  • The Dating
  • Teen Tales
  • Dog Days
  • A Long Story
  • Cooking

White & Bittersweet Chocolate Chunk Bars

03.07.2013 by J. Doe // 1 Comment

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I hope he wrecked his car, says The Child. I hope he goes to jail.

Don’t wish bad things, I tell her. When you send bad wishes into the world, they come back to you.

Wish him his karma, I tell her. Wish that he gets what he deserves.

Everyone does in the end, anyway.

She thinks this is a good plan, and makes her wishes.

We move on to other, more important things: she needs to bring snack to school for one of her classes. We are short on time (I just found out, she says. Tomorrow I need …). I dig through the cookbook shelf and find a book of the very easiest kind of cookies. Bar Cookies A to Z is no longer in print, though you can still get used copies on Amazon. It’s a fun little book and I’ve never had a bad cookie from it.

Instead of bar cookies, says The Child, we’ll make Behind Bar Cookies.

And so we did.

The cookie we chose was White & Bittersweet Chocolate Chunk Bars, which I thought was just your basic Toll House bar cookie only with white chocolate. It isn’t. Half the white chocolate is melted, so the cookie tastes more like a white chocolate brownie; also, there is no baking powder or soda so the cookie base remains fairly dense.

The original recipe calls for raisins, which we omitted on the basis that raisins just don’t belong in chocolate chip anything. We’re pretty sure there’s a law about that and we’re law-abiding types. We omitted the nuts as well because we were unsure if any classmates had nut allergies. I felt the final cookie would have benefited from the added texture of the nuts; The Child thought they were perfect the way they were.

 IMG_8985

White & Bittersweet Chocolate Chunk Bars
 
Print
Prep time
15 mins
Cook time
30 mins
Total time
45 mins
 
Author: adapted from A to Z Bar Cookies
Ingredients
  • ½ cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
  • 6 oz white chocolate (chopped or chips), divided
  • 3 large eggs
  • ⅔ cup sugar
  • 2 tsp vanilla
  • 1¼ cups AP flour
  • 4 oz bittersweet chocolate (chopped or chips)
Instructions
  1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Butter a 9-inch square pan.
  2. Heat the butter in a saucepan over low heat until melted. Remove from heat and add half the white chocolate; do not stir. Set aside.
  3. In a large bowl, beat the eggs with an electric mixer until frothy. Gradually add sugar and beat until the mixture is light, about 3 minutes.
  4. Beat in vanilla.
  5. Add the melted butter and white chocolate mixture along with the flour; stir to blend. Mix in remaining white chocolate and dark chocolate.
  6. Spread batter into prepared pan. Bake about 30 minutes, until the edges start to pull away from the pan. Cool at least 3 hours before cutting.
Wordpress Recipe Plugin by EasyRecipe
3.1.09

 

Categories // The Joy of Cooking Tags // chocolate, cookies

The Road To Nowhere, Part 3

03.06.2013 by J. Doe // 1 Comment

Toward the end of February, a letter arrives, addressed to The Departed, from the State Department of Licensing. I get a funny feeling –  this envelope seems different than the usual “time to renew your tabs” things that usually come from the DOL.

Also, he hasn’t lived in at this address for 18 months, and though I suppose one could argue that since the house was technically half his for 14 of those months, the fact remains that he has had no legal claim to this address for the last four months. He signed it away, and was paid for his share.

I’d say that’s a little over the ten day requirement for notifying the DOL of an address change.

I hold up the envelope to the light. I can’t make out much – they’re good, these government employees – but I can make out a few words in large type quite clearly.

NOTICE OF DRIVER’S LICENSE SUSPENSION.

That would certainly explain why he was walking home with a laptop around dinnertime one evening.

I do a little bit of research, with the help of a lawyer friend, and discover that something happened at the beginning of January, right around the time he was posting caveman song lyrics on Facebook. We can’t see what happened, but it resulted in a court record.

Possibly a speeding ticket. Possibly a DUI. Possibly any number of things, but my lawyer friend says, those are the two likeliest things that would result in a suspended license: If he got a DUI, or neglected to pay a ticket.

I note that The Departed was seen walking home nearly three weeks before his license was suspended.

I also note that The Departed is not aware that his license is suspended, because the suspension came to me. What do I do?

Send it to his lawyer’s office, my friend tells me, and get a delivery receipt. Cover yourself.

I note that this plan will also result in another legal bill for The Departed, and decide that this is an excellent plan.

I only wish, as I forward the letter to The Departed’s attorney, that I knew why it had been sent to him in the first place.

Categories // All By Myself Tags // divorce, single

The Road To Nowhere, Part 2

03.05.2013 by J. Doe // Leave a Comment

I’m perplexed by this run-in with The Departed. We’ve seen him now three times since he left – although he has not seen us, each time. I have blocked him, his friends, and his children from seeing my Facebook page – actually, my former stepdaughter blocked me first, making it the first time she and I actually agreed on anything.

But I have another Facebook account, one that nobody knows about. The one that can see all the things certain people post for everyone in the world to see, except me.

I check his page. There seem to have been a lot of hikes in the fall, and then at the end of the year, suddenly silent except for some bizarre song lyrics about a caveman posted here and there. Attempts at deep thoughts, borrowed from others.

As with most people, there’s no bad news posted: That’s not what Facebook is for.

The only thing I’ve learned is that, at least for a while, he was getting out and doing things, something he steadfastly refused to do while we were married.

Categories // All By Myself Tags // divorce, single

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 84
  • 85
  • 86
  • 87
  • 88
  • …
  • 153
  • Next Page »

Connect

  • Bluesky
  • Email
  • RSS
  • Substack

Subscribe to hear more from Sprung at Last

Loading

Top Posts & Pages

  • Momofuku's Ginger Scallion Sauce
  • Rhubarb Sour Cream Muffins
  • Blueberry Focaccia
  • Fannie Farmer's Banana Bread
  • Fruity Pebble Cookies

Recent Posts

  • Herbert Hoover’s Sour Cream Cookies
  • Ricotta, Lemon, and Blackberry Muffins
  • Deborah Madison’s Potato and Chickpea Stew
  • Richard Nixon’s Chicken Casserole
  • A Room at the Inn, Part 5

Tag Cloud

apples baking bananas beans biking breakfast candy cheese chicken child support comfort food cookies dating dessert divorce holidays Idaho IVF jdate kitchen disasters marriage match.com meat okcupid orange pasta pets pixels prozac random thoughts recipes reflections Seattle single single parenting snack soup The Alumni The Departed The Foreigner vegan vegetarian vintage recipes weekend cooking Wisconsin

About Me

If you’re just jumping in, you might have some questions, which I’ve tried to answer here.

Legalese

Legal information is here
Web Analytics

Copyright © 2025 · Modern Studio Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in