Pin 10: Homemade Twix Bars

Time: 1 1/2 hours 
Cost: $11
Result: Meh.

Originally pinned from: cookiesxo.blogspot.com

What. A. Pain!!!! Henceforth, these shall be known as Pain-In-The-Butt Bars.

First, there's finding the ingredients. 

• 20oz of caramels, which is a bag and a half. I'm never going to use that other half of a bag....so we'll just skimp a bit on the caramel.  

• 18oz of Hershey's chocolate. Have you ever looked at the per $$$ price of that stuff? It tastes like dirt (I might be a tiny bit chocolate snobbish) and according to the sticker it costs over $7 a pound!?! I saw Belgian chocolate for cheaper! Fortunately I happened to see the fun-size Hershey's bars on sale for $4.45 a pound. All snobbery goes out the window when it comes to candy bars, so I went with the Hershey's in case that made this taste more 'authentically Twix'.

Then there's making the different parts.

• The shortbread wasn't difficult per-se, but you have to use room-temp butter (which I forgot to leave out for a few hours) and I had to pull out my big heavy mixer. Luckily I learned a trick with my microwave: Defrost setting 1 = perfectly softened (not melted) butter.
• My favorite part of this step was stabbing the dough with a fork...I may have gone overboard 

• The caramel layer involves unwrapping 50+ individual caramels and then stirring them frequently while they melted at a low temp. The shortbread baked and was half-way to cool in the time it took to finish this process. 

• Then while the caramel was hardening in the fridge, I had to unwrap all the fun-size Hershey bars. Fortunately chocolate melts a lot easier than caramel.

The good things about this recipe:

Makes around 90 small bars
Looks pretty and impressive
It's a great way to show off my PC stoneware and mini serving spatula (I'm a Pampered Chef consultant, so bonus points to any recipe that lets me display my wares)
It tastes fairly authentic, although the shortbread was missing something
Went over VERY well at my event

The bad: 

It's a PITA (Pain In The A**)
It's not much cheaper than buying the same amount of actual Twix
It takes an hour and a half....and I don't mean 5 minutes prep and the rest baking...oh no, there's a lot of mixing and spreading and stirring over a hot stove involved.