A non-chocolate cookie! But these have a lot of peanuts, and peanuts are almost as good as chocolate. The butterscotch chips make these wonderful. They taste kind of like a PayDay candy bar.

Salted Nut Bars

• 1/2 cup margarine
• 1 1/2 cups flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 3/4 C powdered sugar
• 12 oz. salted peanuts (I usually don’t use dry roasted peanuts for this recipe)
• 1/2 cup light corn syrup
• 2 tablespoons margarine
• 8 oz. butterscotch chips

Grease a 9″x13″ pan and preheat the oven to 350°.

Use a mixer to combine the 1/2 cup margarine, flour, salt, and powdered sugar; blend on low speed until it holds together pretty well. Pat the mixture into the prepared pan and bake for 15 minutes.

While the cookies bake, prepare the glaze: mix the corn syrup, 2 T margarine, and butterscotch chips in a small saucepan and bring to a boil. Let it boil a couple minutes after the chips have melted.

Sprinkle the baked dough with the peanuts, then pour on the glaze. Return to the oven for 5 minutes. Cut after cooled for a half hour.

Please refer to my Cookie Recipe Basics to make sure your cookies turn out!
Read the introduction to my 1990s cooking blog for background information.

I loved these cookies as a young girl, enjoying them fresh in my mother’s kitchen. One of my all-time favorite cookies. Why are they called “fingers”? I don’t know. I do know that Mother always cut these into rectangles rather than squares. Maybe that made them finger-like.

Peanut Butter Fingers

• 1/2 cup margarine
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1/2 cup brown sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1/3 cup peanut butter
• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 cup oatmeal
• 1 12-ounce package chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup peanut butter
• 1/4 cup canned milk (you can use fresh milk if you wish; in the 1950s, canned milk was quite common)

Cream the margarine and add the white and brown sugars, mixing well. Blend in the egg,  1/3 cup peanut butter, and vanilla. Stir together the baking soda, salt, flour, and oatmeal, then add to the blended mixture.

Spread in a greased 13″x9″ pan. Bake at 350° for 20 minutes. Sprinkle the baked cookies with the chocolate chips and let stand for 5 minutes, until the chips melt. Then, spread the melted chocolate chips evenly over the cookies.

Combine the powdered sugar, 1/4 cup peanut butter, and milk. Drizzle this peanut butter mixture over the melted chocolate. Cool.

Please refer to my Cookie Recipe Basics to make sure your cookies turn out!
Read the introduction to my 1990s cooking blog for background information.

This recipe introduced me to the convenience of online access. Online access to recipes, my own recipes. I was at work, thinking of which cookie recipes to make for an upcoming TA meeting. I thought: “I want to make those brownies with York Peppermint Patties. Oh, but I don’t have any peppermint patties at home, how many do I need to buy?” And I remembered that I had uploaded that recipe to my cookie web page (my “1990s blog”). Yay! How convenient to have my recipes online.

And perhaps, just perhaps, that is what this whole cooking blog is about. A way to access my own recipes. (Although right now, I also use Dropbox and Pages to access my recipes on my devices, but I digress…)

These rich brownies are really good, and a little unusual. They were always a hit at TA meetings, and with any coworkers who happened by.

York Sensational Brownie Recipe

• 1 1/2 cups margarine, melted
• 3 cups sugar
• 5 eggs
• 1 tablespoon vanilla
• 2 cups flour
• 1 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 24 small (1 1/2″) York Peppermint Patties®, unwrapped

Mix butter, sugar, and vanilla. Beat in eggs until well blended; add vanilla. Stir together the flour, cocoa, baking powder, and salt, then add to the butter-sugar-egg mixture and blend well. (Note that these are made with melted butter. I think I usually just melted the butter in a largish sauce pan, then added the rest of the ingredients and stirred by hand. No need to get out the stand mixer for this recipe.)

Grease a 13x9x2″ pan. Turn oven to 350˚.

Reserve 2 cups of the batter; set aside. Spread the remaining batter in prepared pan. Arrange peppermint patties in a single layer over batter, about 1/2″ apart. Spread reserved 2 cups batter over patties.

Bake at 350° for 50-55 minutes or until brownies begin to pull away from sides of pan. (Do not overcook.) Cool completely in pan on wire rack.

Please refer to my Cookie Recipe Basics to make sure your cookies turn out!
Read the introduction to my 1990s cooking blog for background information.

Bananas are ubiquitous to most American kitchens. But often they ripen faster than they can be peeled and enjoyed as a snack, or on cereal, or in a fruit salad. Their blackening skins cause guilt feelings: We should not waste food! So they go into breads and sometimes, cookies. I used to make these Banana Bars a lot when the kids were around to gobble them up.

Now, about mashing bananas. So many contemporary recipes call for “mashed bananas” to be added to a batter being mixed in a stand mixer. It’s my opinion that that mixer is going to do a heck of a better job of mashing the bananas than I am. Therefore, I only mash bananas enough to get an estimate of how many cups there are, then I let the mixer do the work.

Banana Bars

• 3/4 cup margarine
• 2/3 cup sugar
• 2/3 cup brown sugar
• 1 t vanilla
• 1 egg
• 1 cup lightly mashed bananas (about 2 or 3, this recipe is forgiving if you are not exact)
• 2 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons baking powder
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 12 oz. package mini chocolate chips
• powdered sugar for sprinkling on top

Cream the margarine and the sugars, add the vanilla and egg, then add the bananas. Mix well, until all big chunks of bananas are gone.

Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt, then add to the creamed mixture. Stir in the mini chocolate chips.

Bake in a greased 15 1/2″x 10 1/2″ pan at 350° for 25-30 minutes. Cool, then sprinkle with powdered sugar.

Please refer to my Cookie Recipe Basics to make sure your cookies turn out!
Read the introduction to my 1990s cooking blog for background information.