Nanaimo Ice Cream Bars

Nanaimo bars are a Canadian treat, which in a wonderful twist of fate, were scheduled for this week's Baked Sunday Morning post and completely coincidentally requested by a Canadian friend after I brought the Brown Sugar Shortcakes over to her house for dessert. Named for a West Coast town in British Columbia, Nanaimo bars are traditionally a no-bake bar consisting of a wafer base, custard interior, and chocolate topping. As usual, Matt and Renato put their own spin on the treat, upgrading it to a delicious ice cream bar that is perfect for the summer heat.

 I've never attempted making ice cream bars before (I'm perfectly happy with a bowl of ice cream alone or on top of pretty much any other dessert), so I wasn't certain how well these would go. Although this post comes to you belatedly due to some technical hiccups, these bars are supremely simple to make and utterly delicious. There are several stages to making these bars, but the total hands-on time is only about 20 minutes. As you can probably tell from the photo, I was way too impatient and I didn't chill my ice cream for the proper 2 hours suggested before adding the chocolate fudge topping, thus the unsightly spots of melted ice cream on top of my chocolate coating. Oh well. Even though my Nanaimo bars aren't gorgeous and were a bit messy to eat, none of that detracts from their taste. 

The first step is toasting some walnuts, chopping them into pieces, then blitzing wafer cookies and pretzel sticks in the food processor to form the dry ingredients of the base. The base is pretty adapatable: I used chocolate wafer cookies from Goya, since those were what I had in my cupboard. Similarly, I was unable to find pretzel sticks at Trader Joe's, so I used their pretzel slims instead. Once you have the dry ingredients ready, it's a simple matter of melting 2 tablespoons of butter over simmering water, adding brown sugar and dark cocoa powder off the heat and then slowly whisking in a beaten egg. These wet ingredients are whisked over the simmering water again for a minute or so, until they thicken, then added to the dry ingredients to form the crust. The crust is then chilled in the fridge for 30 minutes to harden. Like the impatient dessert fiend I am, I opted to chill my crust in the freezer for 15 minutes while my ice cream softened.

The recipe for Nanaimo Ice Cream Bars from Baked Occasions recommends salted caramel or vanilla ice cream, but the header text also suggests mint chocolate chip or coffee ice cream as potentially fillings. I adore coffee ice cream, so I went for the Coffee Blast ice cream from Trader Joe's (side note - this is not a Trader Joe's sponsored post, it's just where I happened to be grocery shopping for this recipe). Next, I elected to skip beating the ice cream briefly to soften it, and instead simply scooped it onto the base layer using an ice cream scoop, then evened it out with a flat spatula. The base and ice cream and then meant to go back into the freezer to harden for two hours. This is where my time-cutting measures (I really wanted to try these) cost me, as I only froze the base plus ice cream for one hour. I made the chocolate fudge topping right after I put the bars in the freezer, as it's pretty warm in my apartment and I wanted to give it enough time to come down to room temperature. I used heavy cream I had steeped with two teaspoons of coffee for eight hours in my fudge topping, but the taste didn't really come through (it was still good, obviously).

These Nanaimo ice cream bars are a fantastic addition to anyone's summer dessert recipe collection. They are incredibly low maintenance to prepare, especially if you aren't as impatient as I was this time around. They're perfect for bringing over to a friend's for a party and easily customizable to suit personal tastes. I really enjoyed these with the coffee ice cream, but next time I might make them with vanilla ice cream, or better yet, a vanilla-coffee ice cream swirl on the interior.

Head over the Baked Sunday Mornings to find the recipe and to see how others felt about these summery treats.

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