Crispy-Topped Brown Sugar Bars

A brown sugar/butter/flour base topped with melted bittersweet chocolate and walnuts.  Dorie's recipe suggests topping with caramelized rice krispies, but I wanted to freeze most of these and chose walnuts instead.  Based on other baker's comments I lowered the oven temperature to 350 and baked for only 15 minutes, leaving me with a crust that was very easy to cut, and so sweet.  These bars are more like candy.  So easy to make.  I hope to try them again with the caramelized rice krispies soon.

Lemon Madeleines

Never having eaten a madeleine before I ventured out to Bed, Bath and Beyond to buy a madeleine pan.  The Tuesdays with Dorie online baking group was making lemon madeleines from the cookbook Baking Chez Moi.

The batter was easy to put together.  There are two chilling times - one for the batter and then one for the batter in the madeleine pan.  This meant that the little cakes weren`t finished baking until late in the evening.  I ate one right out of the oven - oh so delicious.  I look forward to more experimenting with madeleines.