January Daring Bakers - Nanaimo Bars and Graham Crackers
Posted By The Barracuda on January 31, 2010
The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and www.nanaimo.ca.
Well. This was an interesting challenge - I loved the idea of making graham crackers, and the nanaimo bars sounded heavenly. It didn’t turn out quite that nice, unfortunately (100% our fault - the recipes were fantastic). The graham crackers came first:
Graham Crackers
Ingredients:
1 cup Sweet rice flour (also known as glutinous rice flour)
3/4 cup Tapioca Starch/Flour
1/2 cup Sorghum Flour
1 cup Dark Brown Sugar, Lightly packed
1 teaspoon Baking soda
3/4 teaspoon Kosher Salt
7 tablespoons Unsalted Butter (Cut into 1-inch cubes and frozen)
1/3 cup Honey, Mild-flavoured such as clover.
5 tablespoons Whole Milk
2 tablespoons Pure Vanilla Extract

We went the regular flour way and used 2.5 cups plus 2 tablespoons of all-purpose flour. For some reason, the graham crackers never became, well, cracker-y. They stayed sort of biscuity no matter what - it may have been that we didn’t roll the dough thin enough, or that we didn’t bake it long enough (recommended 12 minutes with regular flour - we went eighteen).

At any rate, it tasted graham-y, so we went on to the nanaimo bars:
Nanaimo Bars
Ingredients:
Bottom Layer:
1/2 cup Unsalted Butter
1/4 cup Granulated Sugar
5 tablespoons Unsweetened Cocoa
1 Large Egg, Beaten
1 1/4 cups Gluten Free Graham Wafer Crumbs (See previous recipe)
1/2 cup Almonds (Any type, Finely chopped)
1 cup Coconut (Shredded, sweetened or unsweetened)
Middle Layer:
1/2 cup Unsalted Butter
2 tablespoons and 2 teaspoons Heavy Cream
2 tablespoons Vanilla Custard Powder (Such as Bird’s. Vanilla pudding mix may be substituted.)
2 cups Icing Sugar
Top Layer:
4 ounces Semi-sweet chocolate
2 tablespoons Unsalted Butter
Directions:
1. For bottom Layer: Melt unsalted butter, sugar and cocoa in top of a double boiler. Add egg and stir to cook and thicken. Remove from heat. Stir in crumbs, nuts and coconut. Press firmly into an ungreased 8 by 8 inch pan.
2. For Middle Layer: Cream butter, cream, custard powder, and icing sugar together well. Beat until light in colour. Spread over bottom layer.
3. For Top Layer: Melt chocolate and unsalted butter over low heat. Cool. Once cool, pour over middle layer and chill.

The bottom layer of the Nanaimo Bars was heavenly. Dense, cocoa-coconut goodness. The top layer- well, chocolate and butter melted together are almost impossible to screw up.
But did you know that Icing Sugar is not, in fact, granulated sugar? Yeah, so did I. That didn’t prevent me from using it, though, and let me tell you… the texture of the middle layer is not, well, pleasant if you make this mistake. Grainy, even. So the bars didn’t quite come together for us, but I can tell from everyone else’s posts that this was not a common occurrence. So thanks so much to Lauren for an awesome challenge! Sorry we messed it up!

































