Chocolate Chip Cajeta Pretzel Bars

Chocolate Chip Cookies solitas ( all alone) are unquestionably my absolute favorite dessert.....ever. If I'm at a party with one of those super cool, absolutely delicious buffet style dessert tables, my eyes always scan the length of it looking for a soft and chewy brown sugar chocolate chip studded yumminess.

Somehow my feelings about chocolate chip cookies have advanced into a new kind of  amor (love) just by adding two simple ingredients....... Salted Pretzels and Cajeta. Now you may remember a few weeks back I made my own homemade  Mexican Cajeta, if you've never seen it you can find the recipe here. 

So believe it or not as enticing as it was, I still had a little bit of cajeta left  over. I couldn't bare to see it go to waste so I came up with a quick recipe to put it to good use, the result was a rich bar of, sweetness with a creamy gooeyness in the middle, spiked with a salty crunch.

Ummm and did I say all of this was stuffed in the middle of a chocolate chip cookie. No mas palabras necesario ( no more words needed) just a boca ( mouth )full of happiness!

This time I kept it super easy and used my most favorite ready made cookie dough in all the land!  This cookie dough tastes so good, it has been known to cause epic arguments in my casa about who ate the last batch....true story!


If you have a go to chocolate chip cookie recipe feel free to use it, if not here is one that sounded pretty good to me!

Ingredients

1 batch of chocolate chip cookie dough

1 cup of crushed salted pretzels

1 jar of Mexican Cajeta, dulce de leche or caramel sauce


Recipe

1 Preheat oven to 350 degrees , grease brownie bar pan and set aside ( you can see a picture here)

2. Place a spoonful of cookie dough in the bottom in the bottom of your brownie pan.

3. Next sprinkle a handful of crushed pretzels, then a spoonful of cajeta, another spoonful of cookie dough, spoonful of cajeta and a final handful of crushed pretzels.

4. Bake for 12- 15 minutes, remove from the oven right before it's golden brown

5. Cool completely, than carefully remove from brownie bar pan, I like to lay down a piece of wax paper and turn my pan upside down and give a little tap on each cavity to assure easy removal from the pan.

Little Miss Caramelita

As a young chica caramel has

always seemed to run through

my blood, seemed like I loved it on everything.... sandwiched in

between my chocolate bar,  a

smooth drizzle running down my


heaping ice cream scoop, a thick layer slathered on top of a freshly baked box of premade brownie mix  sprinkled with conveniently packaged  pecans......mmmmm I so

loved that stuff! Could there be any topping more wonderful that rich sweet caramel? I thought not......until 9th grade Spanish class when

Sra. Lefevre was going over some of the many different "sabores" or flavors of Latin America and

she mentioned the words "dulce de leche" which she said was" almost like the caramel that we had

here in America, but it was made from milk which made it a little more creamier and provided a

richer taste than caramel. Que dijo?

What did she say? Could it really be? Something creamier and

richer than my caramel compadre? I

had to try some! Well when I finally had the chance to get my

hands on some of that caramel

version of a "Latin lover" it was absolutamente love at first bite! I have taken a vow to be faithful to dulce de leche and use it in every

way I can in place of regular old American caramel, it's overly sweet, underprivileged counterpart. 

And now that I have achieved success with making my own homemade dulce de leche I have become

inspired to create desserts that showcase this yummy salsa in all it's glory.  So here is my very first

confection made up of the very stuff that keeps me going and also made exclusively by me. It's my version of a carmelita but clearly

I have exchanged the caramel for dulce de leche and have affecioniately renamed it muchachita

which in Spanish means- sweet little girl and that is exactly what these are sweet little bars of chocolate, oats and dulce de leche heaven!