BONUS Bready or Not: Peppermint Bars

In the spirit of giving, I'm going to provide some bonus recipes over the next week and a half! These are all seasonal goodies that just plain demand to be posted now.

I saw these Peppermint Crumble Bars over at Something Swanky and knew I had to make them. My husband loves peppermint!



My problem: I didn't have massive quantities of candy canes or peppermints. What I did have was a bag of white chocolate peppermint M&Ms, a seasonal blend I found at Target. In my blender I coarsely chopped a whole bag's worth of M&Ms, and then I added white chocolate chips so that the total amount equaled 2 cups.

The original blog also posted a modified version of the recipe that had more crumble: 3 cups flour, 1 1/2 cups butter, and 3/4 cup sugar. When I make this again, I think I'll follow her advice and increase to those amounts (more cake coverage top and bottom), but I'm posting the original version below.



Peppermint Bars

Ingredients
- 2 cups flour
- 1 cup butter, softened
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 2 cups combined chopped mints and white chocolate (peppermint M&Ms, Andes, chocolate chips, etc)
- 1 - 14 oz can sweetened condensed milk

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350-degrees.

Use a pastry cutter or a fork to cut the butter, sugar, and flour together until crumbly. (Using a mixer is really overkill.)

Press a little more than half of the crumble mixture into the bottom of a greased 9x13 lined baking dish.

In a medium saucepan over low heat, mix 1 cup of the white chocolate peppermint candy and the sweetened condensed milk until smooth. Pour over the crumb crust in the dish.

Sprinkle the remaining crumble and white chocolate peppermint mix evenly over top.

Bake for 20 minutes or until edges begin to just barely brown.

Let cool completely before cutting into squares. [Note: I live in Arizona where it's warm, so I had to keep these refrigerated to stay set.]



OM NOM NOM.