This started out as a random thought I had around Canadian Thanksgiving, and ended as a long, slightly cursed, drawn-out dessert …misadventure. I know, disaster is right there, but there was no disaster, just inconvenience. Skip ahead to the recipe
Context
Back when I was a tween on 56k internet, and later DSL, I spent a lot of time on a Neopets forum being obnoxious with other people my age. The forum itself was actually maintained by an older married couple, who I hope enjoyed seeing our youthful hijinks…well they must’ve, as why else would it have not just been shut down.
I maintained online friendships with these kiddos all the way to their college years and, thanks to faceyb, beyond. At least two of them got married. One moved from St. Louis to the SF Bay Area with his wife, though we never managed to meet up. One moved back home and had a kid. So on and so forth.
The latter was originally from a town called Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada. There was another Canadian forum member, a cheeky boy from Ontario that ended up majoring in engineering and kind of dropping off the map, but he didn’t really talk a lot about Canadian things beyond the Leafs. But she did. One thing I remember is how shocked she was to find out I didn’t know that A&W had a like, fast food restaurant. She knew because she worked there. There’s actually a fair amount of locations in Norcal, and later I made another friend with a strong teenage connection to her local A&W (small fast food world).
The other thing was her asking me if I knew about Nanaimo Bars. I don’t know if she was a big fan of them, or just proud (I did mean she did eventually move back to Nanaimo), but I did not know of them…and I think the conversation kind of ended there, honestly. No detailed explanation of their construction or history or anything.
Decades later, I stumbled across a Jell-o🄬 book that I realized was not-so-secretly Canadian, and in it, a recipe for Family Favorite Nanaimo Bars. I had no idea how accurate the recipe was (turns out pretty close!) but hey, this was produced by Canadians, so that makes it a Canadian recipe for Nanaimo Bars.
Why Were They Slightly Cursed?
Well! The recipe was simple enough, but I was out of graham cracker crumbs (yes, this is a thing I keep in my pantry) and powdered sugar. When my resident grocery shopper returned, he got me Ghirardelli baking chocolate…for which 1 square equals 0.5 oz of chocolate. This is important.
The first layer wanted you to mix finely chopped pecans, graham cracker crumbs, melted butter, and 3 squares unsweetened chocolate and press it into a 9” pan. (By the way, neither this nor the replacement recipe I ended up using recommended lining the pan with wax or parchment paper. No idea why.)
Fun fact: I am very, very slow at chopping
This produced a perfectly suitable looking first layer, so I didn’t think anything was wrong. Apparently it’s customary to also include coconut here, but maybe the recipe writer was like me and not a fan. (My taste disorder means coconut just tastes soapy.)
Fully Edible Dirt
The second layer is…a layer of all time. Apparently the Canadians use something like ‘custard powder’ which we sort of have in the States if you count flan dessert mix. The Jell-o🄬 Instant Vanilla Pudding mix I used also seems to be a common substitution, so that part is maybe not so strange. To that, however, you add melted butter (okay) and a small amount of boiling water (…?). For people unfamiliar with the space-age science behind instant pudding mix, to make it, you usually add a couple cups of milk and just stir it for two minutes and you’re good to go.
After you incorporate your watery buttery mixture, you then add a couple cups of powdered sugar, which is a heck ton of sweetness, and then spread your second layer on. When I made this the second time (more on this later) I decreased the sugar by a half cup, wanting to go further but worried that might affect the set.
Not capable of being pictured: high level of stickiness
The final layer is a Chocolate Ganache. I had to check what constituted a ganache, and the bar is low, and it is met. But my ganache, which also needed 3 squares of chocolate, didn’t really seem Correct. It did eventually set Okay, and it tasted fine, but this led me to finally double-check something that was nagging me.
Shouldn’t one square of baking chocolate equal one ounce?
Turns out the answer is complicated, but yes, the recipe prolly called for twice the amount of chocolate than what I used. (This is why you should avoid using vague package sizes in recipes and stick to volume or weight-based measures.)
So They Didn’t Come Out?
No, they tasted fine. We actually polished off the whole pan before I had a chance to take a photo of a bar, which rarely ever happens. (Admittedly I was procrastinating a bit on that end, but not that much.) They were pretty sweet, but the third layer with the nuts incorporated into the graham cracker crumbs was really successful in my opinion. A nice little inoffensive bar.
When I told my taste-tester how I messed up the chocolate amount, his reaction was more-or-less “Oh, well you’ll just have to make another batch”, which reaffirms how successful the bars were. When I explained I didn’t have enough chocolate to do so, he put it on the shopping list, along with more pecans, since he polished off the leftovers. But I forgot to tell him I also needed a new box of instant vanilla pudding mix, one of the few ingredients I was able to just dig out of my pantry initially. I set aside the cookbook in the vicinity of the kitchen in the meantime.
Three…Hours…Later
More procrastinating happened, but finally I had the wherewithal to make a second attempt…and couldn’t locate the cookbook. I even re-shelved my entire cookbook collection and still didn’t find it. It’s not a small tome, either. It’s possible it got misplaced when my sister’s family visited for Free Candy Day, but…misplaced where?
Eventually I gave up on finding it for the time being and decided since I more or less remembered most of the recipe, perhaps I could find one online and frankenstein a new one. Luckily, I did locate more-or-less the exact recipe, even prefaced with a “I found this in a Jell-o🄬 book”.
I didn’t realize the missing pudding mix until after I had already pressed out my initial layer, and between that and an unsuccessful attempt to install some new-to-me RAM in my compy, I just wanted to lie down for the rest of the day. I awoke at 1am to a small pile of Jell-o🄬 Instant Pudding Mix boxes on the kitchen table, including, but not limited to, vanilla, and went back to work.
Correct Ganache Version
Can I Have The Recipe?
Yeah yeah, of course. It’s really easy, if you have the more North American ingredients readily available at your grocery store. Otherwise I trust you to make suitable substitutions. I did run into some trouble spreading the middle layer evenly, but it’s not really that important. The ganache will hide it. When I make this again (cuz it’s pretty much a guarantee at this point), I’m going to investigate with adjusting the middle layer some more, like…using dairy instead of boiling water, for instance.
Recipe
Bottom Layer
1½ cup graham cracker crumbs
3 ounces unsweetened chocolate
½ cup butter
½ cup finely chopped nuts
(can substitute part of the nuts with coconut)
Middle Layer
1 3-ounce package instant vanilla pudding
⅓ cup butter
⅓ cup boiling water
1½ cups powdered sugar
Top Layer
3 ounces semisweet chocolate
½ cup heavy cream
- Combine graham cracker crumbs, nuts, and coconut, if desired. Carefully melt the unsweetened chocolate and ½ cup butter. Add to crumb mixture and mix well. Press evenly into the bottom of a 9” square pan and refrigerate for about 30 minutes.
- Melt ⅓ cup butter with ⅓ cup boiling water. Stir into powdered mix until smooth (about a minute or so). Slowly incorporate powdered sugar, and spread mixture with a spatula over bottom layer. Return to the fridge to set for about an hour.
- Carefully melt semisweet chocolate in cream over very low heat (or in the microwave in little spurts), stirring as much as possible. Let cool for a bit, then carefully pour evenly over middle layer. (I just angled the pan to even out coverage.) Chill until set – top layer will remain fudgey but serviceable after a few hours, and will set firmer overnight.
