Butterscotch Cream Cheese Bars

Wellll... the recipe itself is interesting enough, but I feel that these bars lack in the taste area. Even though you melt butterscotch and butter together and add 2 cups each of graham cracker crumbs and nuts (to make the crust and the topping), you really can't taste the butterscotch. The ingredient I tasted most was the nuts, and since I don't like them I'm not fond of this particular recipe. The cream cheese filling was very basic - a pound of cream cheese, a little sugar and flour and a few eggs, plus a couple tablespoons of lemon juice. Why the lemon juice? I don't know, but I'm guessing the acidity of the juice does something to the cream cheese mixture.

One technical problem I had was with finding a pan that was the right size. This recipe called for a 10"x15" jelly-roll pan. At first, I thought I had used a very small pan the last time a recipe called for this, but after I pressed the crust into it (thankfully, I used aluminum foil), I realized there was no way the pan was deep enough to hold the crust and the cream cheese mix and topping. So, I put down some foil on a larger cookie sheet (a little bigger than 10"x15", but hey, it was the closest thing I had) and pressed the crust into it. That worked out muuuuch better. It isn't a difficult recipe. You just have to be patient when melting the butterscotch and crushing up the graham crackers and such.

Another small issue I had was with cutting the bars. The recipe says you can cut them into diamonds or squares; for something different and to follow the recipe more closely, I wanted to try the diamond shape. The book describes how to do it, but since it was my first time trying it I got a lot of variation in size. One thing I do recommend though is using foil on the pan. That makes it so much easier to lift the bars out, and after cutting you can just pick them up and peel the foil off the bottom. The foil works very well.

As far as taste, I'd give this recipe a 2 out of 5... I just wasn't impressed. Like I said, I couldn't taste the butterscotch, which I think is a darn shame. Butterscotch is tasty, but only if you can actually taste it.

Well, that's it until I get back from Japan. So far I've completed 31 recipes, and I have 38 more to do before the year is out. Wish me luck! <3

Cheers!

~Jesia