Cake # 15 Hazelnut Crumble Bars

2:11 p.m. - I am pooped. Is it truly sad that a twenty-six year young woman wants to take a nap around three o' clock everyday? Possibly. I do know that my darling Evalyn woke up at 6:00 a.m. on the dot this morning and desperately wanted to play. So, begrudgingly, on a Saturday, Ted and I got up early and decided to make a day of it. We made Evie breakfast, we played "where is Evie?", we even let Shakespeare join in on the fun, though, by 9:00 a.m. he had fallen back asleep - jerk. Then we went food-shopping and decided to have a lunch date with our daughter. Finally, she went down for a nap, and I had some time to bake my next cake.

This cake intrigued me for a lot of reasons. First, they bars not a cake, which made me question how exactly the word cake is defined. That in turn made me realize that I have all twenty volumes of the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, and I have never thought to look up the word cake! Which, in turn, made me realize that I was very mad at myself for not thinking of this earlier. Secondly, I was intrigued by one of the ingredients - Nutella, which the recipe books unbrandishly (get it?) calls for a "chocolate hazelnut spread".

First, the definition of cake: a comparatively small flattened sort of bread, round, oval, or otherwise regularly shaped, usually baked hard on both sides. The word cake originated in our language 1230, but as you can probably guess from its sound, it is Germanic in origin. In this sense then, these bars, certainly do fit under the category of a cake, so I learned something new and I got to use a volume from my dictionary, which makes me happy.

Second, Nutella. This product scared me as a child. I saw a lady once at a Mars supermarket pick it up and put it in her cart, I had never heard of it before, but I knew it was brown. I asked my mother what it was, and she said you put it on your bread, like you do with jelly. So, I always assumed that it was a nut and a fruit mixture based off its name and my mother's remark. And, as any seven year old child would do, I imagined the most disgustingly flavored jelly (after all, it was brown) and in my mind added peanuts, and tried to determine a taste, and all I remember was it had to be bad. Twenty years later, here I am again confronted with Nutella. (I feel like you must say its name with your best William Shatner impression, pronouncing each of its three syllables, and shaking your fist in the air). However, this time, I discovered that it was a chocolate and nut mixture....wait what?! How did I possibly go twenty years without ever bothering to learn what Nutella actually was? There is a slap in my face for my myopic ways. No matter - tried a bite of it, and still not a huge fan.

But in this mysterious cake bar? Excellent. This recipe called for eggs, vanilla, light brown sugar, butter, flour, baking powder, hazelnuts, "chocolate hazelnut spread", raw brown sugar, and forty minutes of bake time in the oven at 325 degrees.

I think the reason why I like these bars so much is because of the infamous hazelnut. When I was a kid, every year at Christmas my parents would buy those variety nut packages (I know, so many jokes - fingers cannot keep up with my mind to type them) and the hazelnuts were always the hardest to crack. They barely stayed in the nut-cracker and they were harder than my husband's head. It was a lot of work, for such a little nut, but the reward was great- sweet, crunchy, nutty (bleh no adjective better than that I guess), and I loved their taste. So biting into these bars, well it reminded me of Christmas, and of my old home.

Here is what the picture in the book looks like:

And here are my bars:

Tonight, is a girl's night out, hopefully they will like my nutty bars! Stay tuned for cake number sixteen an applesauce cake- that is for you Mom C!