This is a beautiful little cake cookie whatever–delicious, white chocolatey, and just a wee bit cookie textured.
This recipe is an adapted version of the Lemon Vanilla Dream Bars recipe from the great little book Pure Vanilla by Shauna Sever (Amazon). You will find recipe after recipe after recipe (80! of them) for all the vanilla treats you crave in her book. There are vanilla drinks, vanilla cakes, vanilla breakfasts. There also are cogent essays about the history and fraught present of vanilla production.
Sever’s recipe calls for swirling a generous dollop of lemon curd through the cake batter. There was no lemon curd to be found in my pantry, so I switched things out to use a British-made Wilkin and Sons Tiptree Raspberry Jam I had in my refrigerator. (I got carried away and bought a 32 ounce jar of the imported jam at Costco. What does one person do with 32 ounces of raspberry jam?) The raspberry jam changed the whole character of the little cake but I kind of think it was for the better. The red swirls on the top of the cake are beautiful and the bites of treacly jam dispersed throughout the cake were a delightful surprise in each bite.
(Incidentally, Ina Garten has a recipe and video showing how to make your own vanilla extract. It’s fun! Here is a link to that video: Ina’s Vanilla.
Here is my take on the Vanilla Raspberry Cake bars:
Vanilla Raspberry Dream Bars
Ingredients
- 10 oz. white chocolate (chopped and divided)
- 6 T. unsalted butter (cut into cubes)
- 1/4 C. granulated sugar
- 1/2 t. salt
- 2 large eggs (at room temperature)
- 1 t. vanilla extract
- 1 t. vanilla bean paste
- 1 cup all-purpose flour (sifted)
- 1/2 C. raspberry jam
Directions
- Step 1 Here is how I put this recipe together.
- Step 2 Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. and prepare an 8 inch by 8 inch pan by coating it with cooking spray and lining it with parchment paper. To make it easier to remove your cake from the pan once it is baked, cut the parchment larger than the pan and leave two ends of the paper hanging over the side of the pan to use as handles.
- Step 3 Put 8 ounces of the white chocolate in a glass bowl along with the butter and melt it over a pan of simmering water stirring occasionally. Take the bowl off the heat and stir in the sugar and the salt.
- Step 4 Whisk the eggs into the chocolate mixture–one egg at a time. In a separate bowl, combine the vanilla with the vanilla bean paste using a whisk. After the vanillas are combined, fold in the flour and the remaining two ounces of white chocolate. Scoop this batter into your prepared pan and smooth the top.
- Step 5 Spoon the jam onto the top of the batter in about five portions. Swirl the jam into the batter using a thin tool like a knife until you have a decorative pattern.
- Step 6 Bake the bars for about 25-30 minutes. When the cake is done, a toothpick inserted in the middle of the cake should come out clean. Remove the cake from the oven and let it cool on a wire rack. When the cake is cool, lift it out of the baking pan and cut it into bars.
