Ashley Bars

How to do it…

1. Preheat oven to 325°/170° C. Prepare your pans (I use butter to grease everything--you can also use Crisco or Trex).
2. Melt butter, then, once melted, add brown sugar and mix well. Cool (okay, the congo bar recipe says "cool" and, obviously, when you put in the eggs, you don’t want them to cook in hot butter but I just take my time melting the butter so it doesn’t get too hot, dump in the sugar and take this off the burner and then see to my flour bits and then go back and put the eggs in). Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each egg.
3. Sift flour, baking powder and salt together. Usually, you sift flour to lighten the flour and get air into it as it gets all compacted in those flour bags or your flour canisters. But, with this, the end product is so dense and rich, you could probably skip the sifting part and just whisk these ingredients to combine. But, I like the act of sifting, it makes me feel all pastry chef-y, so I do it anyway.
4. Add flour mixture to the brown sugar mixture (or vice versa) and mix well. Add all your extra bits and mix well. This will take some arm power to stir all those bits into that heavy batter. This will also give you the feeling that you are burning calories so you can eat more Ashley Bars once they’re done. This will not actually be true, but please, feel free to go with that thought.
5. Pour into two greased pans (7 ½” X 11 X 1 ½” --I don’t know where these dimensions came from, by the by, I think when I wrote down this recipe years ago, I measured one of my pans because I can be anal retentive, but I’m not good at measuring stuff, there might not even be a baking pan in these dimensions --but a square pan x 2’ll do, these don’t rise much, so don’t worry overly much about that part). Bake for 25 to 30 minutes (or more, check--you can go two ways with these, underbake them for ooey gooey treats or bake them to the point where a toothpick comes out clean).