I apologize for the ugly picture and that I didn't take the time to arrange them nicely for the photo shoot. Making these bars was a traumatic experience for me, one that left me so scarred that I slowed down my baking a lot.
Although, to be honest, it was also the coming of beautiful warm weather that made me slow my baking a little. I mean, who wants to be in the kitchen all day with the oven on when it's 85 degrees out? As much as I love baking, in weather like that I'd much rather be sitting outside in the sun reading Twilight, but that's another story.
But I digress. We all know about my nut allergies. I have to be careful when I'm baking with nuts. I've baked with almonds with not much of a problem, and I've baked with pecans and just had some uncomfortable itchiness but nothing too bad. Well, as the title of this recipe suggests, it had walnuts in it. Apparently walnuts are pretty dangerous to me.
I was very careful not to touch them at all. I had to toast them so I poured them from the bag onto the baking sheet and spread them around with a spoon, no touching. Throughout the whole process I used a spoon to scoop them, spread them, etc. Well, all the caution was not enough, because apparently I can't even breathe when I'm in the same room with walnuts.
My reaction wasn't as bad as it could have been. I didn't go into anaphylactic shock or anything like that, but I did get a horrible case of hives on my arms. Hives don't sound that bad, but these were bad hives. I won't get into all the details because it would be disgusting and you would no longer have any interest in reading about food. Suffice it to say, it was very uncomfortable. My body fighting the toxin made me so tired I took a 2 hour nap, and when I woke up the hives were still bothering me. I even had to call out of work.
I had a hard time believing I could get such a bad reaction just from being near walnuts, but there was no other explanation for that reaction. So I didn't bother with arranging these all nice and pretty for a picture, because obviously I didn't want to touch them.
I unfortunately now must alter this project a little bit. From now on I will be avoiding recipes with walnuts, and probably peanuts also. I am going to replace them with other recipes from Martha Stewart so that I still do 175 recipes, some of them just won't actually be from the Cookies cookbook, but I will note them at the time.
My mother tried one of these bars and said they tasted like a hippie made them. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing, but that's the only feedback I had on these so that's all I can tell you.
Yield:
Recipe predicts: About 2 dozen.
Actual: I don't know, I didn't count.
56 recipes down, 119 to go.
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