Recipe: Chewy Fudgy Oatmeal Bars

This recipe started out as a recipe from Toll House called Oatmeal Fudge Squares from their book “Holiday Baking with Nestle Toll House” from November of 1991.…. I didn’t want to use nuts so I had to adapt the recipe slightly to compensate…. After making them… and they were sooo good…. I decided the next time I would try adding pecans… the flavor of pecans will go wonderfully with the other ingredients.

Now for a couple of tips….

The dough is very, very sticky….. you need to spread it on the bottom of the pan… when you dump the dough in the pan and start spreading it with the back of a spoon… you think it will never spread far enough…. It eventually does… it will be a very thin layer…. I even had a few slightly bare spots where the pan peeked through…. That’s okay… the heat of the baking will spread it. The same goes for the chocolate layer, although that wasn’t quite as bad.

The top layer is a portion of that sticky dough for the bottom layer… the original recipe says to “crumble” it over the top…. trust me…. this dough doesn’t crumble… so I just dropped small pieces of the dough all over the top…. I worried that it wouldn’t spread… but it did… in fact it puffed up toward the end of the baking time…

I thought this would be one for the recipe graveyard (that place where I throw all those recipes that are not blog worthy)…. Well happily I was wrong…. They cut easily after being cooled (I use a pizza cutter for an easier cut) and were fantastic…. a chocolate lovers bar cookie for sure.

Take note…. The recipe calls for sweetened condensed milk not evaporated milk… there is a huge difference.



Warren brought some to work with him… to make them look extra nice… I flattened white muffin cup liners and laid them in there…. (see picture).


This really wasn’t hard… it was a little more difficult for me because I wasn’t warned what to expect in the recipe…. sometimes you just have to dive right in and try things… glad I did.








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Recipe: Chewy Fudgy Oatmeal Bars

All you need:

2¼ cups flour
¾ teaspoon baking soda
1 cup (2 sticks) butter or margarine, softened
1 ½ cups firmly packed brown sugar
1 egg
2 cups quick cooking oats (uncooked)
1 cup pecans, chopped (optional)
1 (12 ounce package or 2 cups Nestle Toll House semi-sweet chocolate morsels, divided
1 (14 ounce) can Carnation sweetened condensed milk

All you need to do:

Preheat your oven to 350 degrees F.

Line your baking pan with foil for easier removal of bars after baking. Set aside.

In a small bowl combine the flour and baking soda. Set aside.

In a large bowl (I used my Kitchen Aid Mixer), beat the butter and brown sugar until creamy.

Add the egg and beat at low speed.

Add the flour mixture a little at a time.

Stir in the oats and pecans (if adding nuts).

Reserve 1 cup of this dough. Set aside.

Press the remaining dough into the bottom of an ungreased 15 ½ x 10 ½ x 1 inch baking pan. Set aside.

In a medium saucepan, melt 1 ½ cups of the Nestle semi sweet chocolate morsels with the sweetened condensed milk, stirring constantly until smooth.

Pour over the unbaked crust. Spread out the chocolate to cover.

Drop very small pieces of the reserved dough all over the top of the chocolate. (I tried to drop pieces the size of peas… some were larger though).

Sprinkle the remaining ½ cup of semi-sweet chocolate morsels over the top.

Bake at 350 degrees F for 23-27 minutes until topping is golden brown.

Cool completely before cutting.

Cut into 2 inch bars.