Sea Salt Caramel Cookie Bars

Crack. That's what these are. Ridiculously addictive and ridiculously easy to make. If you can be patient enough to let them set you can cut them up and serve them and be the favorite person at any party.

Salty and sweet with a slight crunch and soft gooey center.

Sea Salt Caramel Cookie Bars

For the cookies:
2 1/4 cups flour
1 cup butter (two sticks)
2 eggs
3/4 cup dark brown sugar (light works just as well)
3/4 sugar
2 tsp vanilla
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup milk chocolate chips
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips

For the caramel:
50 caramel cubes
1/4 cup heavy whipping cream
sea salt



Preheat your oven to 350 F.
You can use any cookie batter recipe that you like but this one is my favorite as of now. Use room temperature butter but if you're like me you forget that part and end up zapping it in the microwave. Just don't melt them completely or your batter will be a little too soft to work with. Save your butter wrappers to grease your pan with later. Mix the butter and sugar together until you have a nice creamy texture. Add both eggs and mix them in. Then add the vanilla. It might be my imagination since I have a slight obsession with vanilla but to me it seems mixing the vanilla in with the eggs takes away some of the flavor it could add to your cookie dough.

In another bowl mix your baking soda, salt, and flour together. Just give them a quick stir as all you want to do is make sure the salt and baking soda is evenly distributed throughout your dough. I'm always afraid of over beating the dough which can make your cookies taste funny (I still don't know why though). So I dump the whole mixture in and mix just until there is no more flour to be mixed in. A thing I learned if you do it this way or whenever I add dry ingredients is to just hold the beater in place and let them do there thing. Moving them around the bowl usually just creates a dust cloud for me and gets everywhere. Whatever way you mix just make sure to get the sides and bottom of your bowl. Stir in the chocolate chips.

Now grease whatever pan you are using. I used a 9 by 9 in square glass pan as I wanted thick bars so each bite had lots of cookie and caramel in it. Take half your dough and plop it into your pan. Now pushing out from the center to the edges make your dough cover the entire bottom of the pan. You want to try and have an even layer of thickness. Now pop that sucker into the oven for about 8 minutes. The goal is not to completely cook it but just set it enough that the caramel wont leak through when you pour it on top.

If the dough is still pretty soupy after eight minutes stick it in for a few more minutes until it seems to be set a bit. Now let it get fairly cool so it can set even more. Pouring the caramel right onto after it comes out of the oven leads to a swamp land of cookie dough and caramel. No less delicious but slightly hazardous if children get into it and then start touching things in your house....

Onto the caramel! I'm a lazy person and impatient at that. So I use child labor and the microwave for this part. Have some kids or an unsuspecting significant other to unwrap 50 of those caramel squares for you and make sure they throw all those pesky little wrappers away! Dump all those into a microwave safe bowl and pour your heavy whipping cream in. You can use sweetened condescend milk in a pinch here. I just prefer the flavor of the heavy whipping cream kind. :) Zap the whole lot in the microwave for about 45 seconds the first round. Then 25 seconds every time after that. Now caramel is kind of like chocolate in the fact it is melting even though it doesn't look it. So using a wooden spoon do a quick stir to see if its melted. You want to get it to the consistency of melted caramel with a few lumps in it. Over cooking is bad...trust me and my broken microwaves. Stir until all lumps are gone and the dough base should be finished cooling by now.

Pour the caramel onto the cookie base and then add a healthy sprinkling of sea salt caramel. How much you add is up to you and how much you like that salty sweet combination. I like to give a few healthy shakes and make sure each piece would have a good amount of salt. Next, scoop out the rest of the cookie dough and press it between your hands to form the top layer. You could be fancy and get some wax paper and press it blah blah blah quick and dirty folks. You might need to do it in sections depending on your dough. Just get as much of the caramel covered as you can. Then put it into the oven to bake for 25 minutes. Using other oven I've had to bake it for as long as 40 minutes so just check with a toothpick to see if the top layer is done. After that let them cool and stick into the fridge to set. DO NOT put a straight from the oven dish into the fridge! Let cool for at least half an hour. You can add powdered sugar on top or leave it plain as I did.

Now that you have this delicious dessert go enjoy yourself...and maybe share :)