Happy New Year & Gooey Oat Bars

It's 9am on January 1st and I'm pulling a dessert out of the oven, because what better way to start a new year than with one of the things I love most - baking!

While I enjoy posting baking experiments, book reviews, and other projects on Instagram, the platform is inherently limiting in some ways. So after a 15-year hiatus from blogging, I decided to create a fresh space for sharing and record-keeping. Without further ado:

First Bake of 2025 - "Bake Sale Winning-est Gooey Oat Bars" by Smitten Kitchen
*recipe is from Smitten Kitchen Every Day and can be found online with permission here

Notes:

• I made a half batch in an 8x8 pan, which involved annoyingly dividing an egg, but was worth it because we don't need the full "24-36" servings.
• The book recipe includes weighted measures for almost all the ingredients, but inexplicably not the coconut (for which it also says sweetened or unsweetened?), so I checked the King Arthur ingredient chart and landed on using 25g sweetened.
• The chocolate (and/or candy bars/fruit) quantity is also ambiguous, so I used 125g semisweet chocolate chips, which felt like the most accurate control for a first try.
• I did have to add a splash of milk to get the shortcrust base to come together.
• For the filling, I recommend putting the sugars and salt in a separate bowl and transferring the browned butter out of the saucepan/skillet because I don't like the risk of carryover heat cooking the butter further. It might be unneccesary at these quantities, but it's a "standard practice" for me with brown butter.

Results: Enthusiastically good. 4/5 ☆

They are quite sweet and I questioned adding some flaky sea salt on top, but family said it wasn't needed. The texture is gooey as promised, but balanced. I didn't follow the recipe rec to sprinkle with powdered sugar before serving, which I think is perfectly fine to skip. I wouldn't call them "winning-est," but they'd be a crowpleaser, sure.

Here's to a sweet, bookish, and creative 2025!