Daring Bakers in January: Passionfruit Nanaimo Bars

The January 2010 Daring Bakers’ challenge was hosted by Lauren of Celiac Teen. Lauren chose Gluten-Free Graham Wafers and Nanaimo Bars as the challenge for the month. The sources she based her recipe on are 101 Cookbooks and http://www.nanaimo.ca/.



This month's challenge was two-fold: make graham crackers, and in honor of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, turn them into that all-Canadian and all-sweet treat, Nanaimo Bars.  Though part of the original challenge was to make them gluten-free, a half hour of calls to every Indian and organic food store in Zurich yielded no sorghum flour to use as one of the gluten-free flours in the graham cracker recipe.   Since the few gluten-free friends I have all live far away, I saved myself any further time and hassle (and long, quizzical pauses from stumped shop assistants) by just using whole wheat flour instead.



Despite my neat edge-trimming and decorative fork-prick patterns that made the raw crackers look pretty on the baking sheet, they turned into homogeneous, crisp, vaguely-rectangular blobs by the time they came out. Good thing I had to crumble them up to make the bars anyway!  Their unattractive shape belies their flavor - the biscuits have a deep, dark brown-sugar taste, far better than store-bought, and I'm looking forward to using the crumbs for a cheesecake crust tomorrow night.

Nanaimo bars are decadently, tooth-achingly sweet, very very addictive.  A chewy brownie-like base, stuffed with coconut, chopped almonds, graham cracker crumbs, cocoa, and oodles of butter is slathered with a generous layer of buttercream icing (yep, more butter) and then topped with dark chocolate (mixed with melted butter).  These are basically a heart attack cut into very small squares.



In order to provide a little more interest than just butter, I added some passionfruit pulp (leftover from the recent tart) to the buttercream icing, which resulted in a tangier flavor and a good combination with the chocolate and coconut.  I would definitely recommend being inventive with the flavoring in that layer - I'm sure almost any tropical fruit would work well, or else you could go in a completely different direction and try espresso or mocha or mint. OR, you could take every imaginable direction, utterly reinvent the compass, and come up with pomegranate, cherry, rose, poppy seed, roasted pine nuts, cumin, fennel, chives and parsley Nanaimo Bars like Audax Artifex, the incredibly creative and undisputed King of the Daring Bakers!  Check his other amazing flavor combinations out too, they are truly mind boggling!