Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Bars

This is for you, Melody! These are the cookie bars I made for game night on Thursday. They are ridiculously easy and so good.

The first time I made them I followed the recipe exactly. When I made them for game night I used unsalted butter, quadrupled the salt, reduced the chocolate by 2 or 3 ounces and pressed it all into a 7x11 pan instead of 11x13. That ended up being my favorite iteration, it definitely needs a little more salt and a little less chocolate and I liked the taller bar that came from the smaller pan. When I made them again on Saturday for a BBQ I used regular salted butter, doubled the salt and did half chocolate and half butterscotch chips, which was also really good.


The original recipe is copied from here (an AWESOME recipe blog. If you're not already reading you might want to start. Everything I've tried from her blog has been a winner).

Oatmeal Chocolate Chunk Bars
adapted from 24 Hour Menu

1 3/4 cup flour
3/4 tsp soda
1/4 tsp salt
1 cup oatmeal
3/4 cup butter
1/2 cup sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
12 ounces semi sweet chocolate chunks
1 cup chopped walnuts (optional – I left these out)

Preheat oven to 375. Whisk together dry ingredients and set aside. Beat butter, sugars, egg and vanilla till fluffy and add dry ingredients. Stir in chocolate chunks and walnuts. Press into a greased 9×13 inch pan and bake for 18-20 minutes until light golden brown. I have also doubled the recipe and pressed into a large sheet pan (11X17) with great results.

A few tips: Don’t overbake!!! I overbaked them the first time I made them and when I actually baked them correctly the second time (perhaps even underbaked by a minute), they were 100 times better. Also, the second time I made them, I doubled the recipe and instead of adding two bags of chocolate chunks, I added one bag of chunks and one bag of mint chocolate chips. Fabulous!