Feel the magic as you bite into these delicious cookie bars made with dark chocolate, milk chocolate, butterscotch, coconut and pecans all on a crispy graham cracker crust. They are pure bliss and it goes without saying, that one of these cookies with make your whole day so much better! It’s just one of those things you look forward to after a long morning at work, or a good run in the park, or even after dinner for dessert. And they pack really well for picnics and in lunch pails! The only caveat on these cookies, is that you really kind of have to like coconut. Without the coconut, they’d just be six layer bars! But, that is the hang up at our house, because Daddage-man does not like coconut. Oh well, more for the rest of us!
We make our Seven Layer Bar recipe with the same combination of bittersweet chocolate, milk chocolate and butterscotch chips that we use in our Triple Chip Cookies, which are sooooooo good! Some Seven Layer Bars call for white chocolate or just semi-sweet chocolate, but we really love this combination together!
The nice thing about these cookies is that you can freeze them and they thaw out beautifully. We once took them frozen in coolers on a 7-day back country river rafting trip and they were amazing! Quite the treat to find in the middle of the wilderness!
The recipe calls to make these in a 9×13 pan, but we often divide the recipe into two 8×8 aluminum pans, because those pans fit perfectly into a gallon Ziploc baggie and that makes it super convenient for freezing. Also, this way you don’t eat the whole batch in one sitting, which is easy to do. It’s kind of like an even-off thing … oh my gosh, that edge is a little crooked, let me just even it out here, and before you know it, the whole pan has been evenly cleaned right out!
Scrumptious Seven Layer Bars
Ingredients
Graham Cracker Crust
- 5 oz. butter, melted (10 tablespoons)
- 2 cups graham cracker crumbs
Topping
- 6 oz. bittersweet chocolate chips (60% cacao)
- 6 oz. milk chocolate chips
- 6 oz. butterscotch chips
- 1 1/3 cups flaked coconut
- 1 cup chopped pecans
- 1 can sweetened condensed milk (14 oz.) (be sure to get sweetened condensed and not evaporated milk … they are totally different!)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease the bottom and sides of a 9×13 pan well with butter or give it a good coating of cooking spray. (Or two 8×8 tins, if you are splitting the recipe in two for freezing half the recipe it giving half away to a friend!)
- Blend graham cracker crumbs and melted butter in a small mixing bowl and stir until well combined. The mixture should hold together when pressed into the palm of your hand.
- Pour the graham cracker crumb mixture into the bottom of the prepared pan and pat down firmly with a flat metal spatula or the back of a spoon.
- Evenly distribute each of the baking chips to cover the entire crust. Repeat the same process with the coconut and the chopped pecans.
- Drizzle the sweetened, condensed milk evenly over the top of all of the goodies. You will need to use a spatula or a cake frosting spreader to spread the condensed milk out as evenly as possible. Don’t worry about making it perfect, though!
- Bake for 25-30 minutes, or until the edges begin to brown and all of the chips are melted and gooey. The chips will firm back up once you cool them, but for now they should look soft!
- Remove from oven and cool to room temperature. Once completely cooled, cut into bars and gobble them up! These store really well in the refrigerator or the freezer. Just be sure to let frozen bars thaw a bit before biting into them!
