White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake Bars

 I didn't get a picture of the White Chocolate Raspberry Cheesecake Bars I made for my French groups gathering.  We had a potluck on my patio, and I wanted to provide a variety of desserts.  I had leftover raspberry sauce in the refrigerator, and several white chocolate bars I needed to use up.  So I decided to try this recipe from Sallys Bake Blog.  

The recipe calls for a 9"square pan, which I don't have. I decided to make them in my 9 x 17 pan.  It's a plus that this pan has a lid so storing in the refrigerator overnight would be easy.

Instead of regular Oreos like the recipe calls for, I used Whole Foods brand "Oreos".  They have better ingredients than Nabisco. I followed the recipe and processed 22, including the filling, but it far exceeded the 250 g called for in the recipe.  They were dry and made for a stiff and crumbly crust that wasn't coming together as it was supposed to. I had to eyeball adding more melted butter without making it too greasy in order to get a crust that held together. I did manage in the end, but it still didn't fit the description of what the crust was supposed to look like. 

The recipe says to pour half of the filling into the pan, then the sauce, then the other half of the filling. If I were making these again, I'd take the tie to weigh the filling in order to figure out how much is half, because it's too difficult to eyeball. 

I prepared the bars and but ran out of time so I placed them in the refrigerator overnight, to bake them the next day, 

The next day I baked the bars for 40 minutes, and they were still kind of jiggly all over. At that point I took the out of the oven, because my oven runs hot and there were brown spots on top of the bars.  It's so hard for me to know when to take a custard out of the oven.  I just don't make them often enough! However, they could have baked an additional 4-5 minutes because when I cut the bars, I saw that the portion in the center had a bit of a soggy crust and was not cooked through. One factor leading to this could have been that instead of "drizzling" the raspberry sauce over the filling I poured it from a bowl. So raspberry sauce concentrated in some spots, especially in the center, the part that ended up underbaked. 

It would be better to take the time to transfer the raspberry sauce to a measuring cup, and be able to really drizzle the sauce, rather than drop dollops from a bowl!

 I tried to follow the recipe's directions to draw a design on the bars by dragging a toothpick through the raspberry sauce.  But after refrigerating the bars, they were cracked along the lines I'd drawn with the toothpick.  

Maybe next time put the raspberry sauce in a measuring cup to be able to drizzle it, instead of pouring it from the bowl because this resulted in blobs. Also, I think they'd cook better if they didn't spend the night in the fridge.

This worked out ok bc I was cutting them into bite size pieces. But if I'd wanted bigger squaters, they would have lookd bad.