Butterscotch Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Bars

My sweet tooth was kicking in last night, but I resisted the urge to bake anything because my weight has crept up a bit which bothers the hell out of me. I normally am very good at keeping my weight below a certain point, but a few pounds managed to creep on and have been persistent for over a week now, so I have been trying to cut back until I can get them back off again.

Most of that went out the window today of course because I go back to work tomorrow after a stretch of days off and heaven forbid I show up empty handed -- I have a reputation to maintain. The temptation from yesterday was for butterscotch oatmeal chocolate chip cookies so that's what I decided to make. I followed the basic recipe on the back of the butterscotch chip package for the oatmeal scotchies -- only using all brown sugar instead of half white and half brown, and adding most of a bag of chocolate chips as well as a bunch of chopped walnuts.

I realized as soon as I had the cookie dough mixed up that I had a problem though... there was a lot of cookie dough and somehow I just kept eating it... I realized that the only way to keep myself from eating a lot of it was to make bar cookies because otherwise I was going to keep shoving chunks of it in my mouth, you know... to test it. Somehow I can resist the finished product, but the dough... well, that's fair game... as if the calories don't count... *sigh*

So I grabbed my 9x13 pan, sprayed it with baking spray, patted the dough in there and baked it for around 30 minutes at 325. It worked perfectly and the bars were yummy. And of course bars are much, much easier and faster than cookies.



Ingredients:
1 1/4 cups all purpose flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp salt
2 sticks butter at room temp
1 1/2 cups dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 cups oatmeal
1 2/3 cups (11 oz package) Butterscotch Chips
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips
1 cup chopped walnuts

Preheat oven to 325. Grease a 9 x 13 pan.

Mix flour, baking soda, cinnamon and salt in a bowl. In another bowl cream together the butter and sugar until lightened and fluffy. Add the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Beat in the vanilla extract. Add the dry ingredients and mix just until combined. Add all the chunky ingredients and mix until they are blended in.

Pat the dough into the pan and bake for 25 minutes. The bars might be jiggly in the center still, so check periodically until the middle looks set -- underdone bars will always be better than overdone bars though.