Pumpkin-Spice Bars: The secret ingredient is carrots

When carrots multiply in the refrigerator, it's time for pie!

"Pumpkin" Spice Bars (made with carrots) Before beginning, cut the carrots for the filling into 2 or 3 inch pieces (no need to be precise). Place in a microwave-safe bowl with about 2 tbsp water. Cover the bowl with a plate. Microwave until tender, and set aside to cool. Heat oven to 350°. Line an 8" round pan with foil, then coat with cooking spray. Crust: ¼ cup butter or stick-type margarine ¼ cup brown sugar ¼ cup oats ½ cup flour Thoroughly mix the sugar and margarine (add a pinch of salt if using unsalted butter). Add oats and flour, mix well. Sprinkle evenly into the pan, then pat and press firmly into a flat crust. Bake 15 minutes. Make the filling and topping while it bakes. Filling: 8 oz cooked and cooled carrots (weigh after cooking) ¾ cup (half of a 12-ounce can) evaporated milk* 2 eggs ¾ cup sugar ½ tsp salt 1 tsp cinnamon ¼ tsp cloves ¼ tsp ginger Place the carrots, evaporated milk, and eggs in a blender. Blenderize thoroughly. (If the carrots are still hot, blenderize them with the milk first, then add the eggs and blenderize them some more.) Pour them into a bowl and add the remaining ingredients. Mix well. (If your blender is large enough, you can simply add the sugar and spices and then blenderize everything together.) Pour onto the crust, and spread it evenly into the pan. Sprinkle with topping and bake 15 minutes, or until set. Like a cheesecake, it's done when it jiggled but doesn't slosh. Topping: 2 tbsp stick-type margarine ½ cup brown sugar ½ cup nuts (we recommend pecans) Mix the margarine into the brown sugar. Then add the nuts. *If you don't know what you'd do with the remaining half-can of evaporated milk and don't want to freeze it, use a 5-ounce can and add 2 tbsp of regular milk. Note: When you first pour the filling into the pan, it should be thick enough that the topping sits on it rather than sinking in. If not, bake the filling for about 15 minutes. Then sprinkle on the topping and bake 10-20 minutes, or until set. Adapted from a handwritten recipe card

Today on A Book of Cookrye, we are bringing out a charming recipe card I've been wanting to make for a long time! It looks like a nice recipe for pumpkin cookies, doesn't it? While I could have used the ingredients listed, we have carrots breeding in the refrigerator. And so, instead of pumpkin, we're using these!

In the comments under our recent carrot tarts, Freezy noted that apparently carrot pies are a bit of a trend at the moment. Apparently people are flipping through vintage cookbooks and discovering the tasty recipes that lie between the gaudy gelatin horrors, and carrot pies have been brought back from between the pages.

I'm not at all surprised at the rediscovery of carrot pies. For quite some time, making terrible-looking recipes from old cookbooks has been a popular video genre on social media. It was only inevitable that a few "content creators" would read the rest of the book and find the good recipes. Since swapping pumpkin for carrots has been a popular "cooking hack" since the days when they were called "household hints" (and even before then), you see it suggested in a lot of cookbooks. And of course, in the days before you could simply buy a can of pumpkin, you had to butcher an actual fresh pumpkin and stew it yourself. Doesn't dropping whole carrots into a pot of water sound wonderfully easier?

Speaking of easier, we decided to microwave the carrots instead of simmering them. Not only is the microwave a lot faster, but I think it tastes better. You don't lose half the flavor when you drain off the cooking water. 

While the carrots were merrily spinning on the microwave's glass platter, we could begin the crust. Like so many cookie recipes, it starts with a delicious and sticky mixture of butter and sugar.

I thought that perhaps I should mix in the flour first and then separately add the oats (as is customary when making cookies), but then I figured that I could probably just dump everything in with no ill results. I was right.

Our resulting dough tasted, unsurprisingly, like oatmeal cookies. They were perhaps a tiny bit bland, but I wasn't worried about that. After all, this is the foundation on which our pumpkin-spice filling will rest. Too many flavors could start clashing in the completed cookies. After all, how many of us season our pie dough before putting a pie in it?

Like the sour cream pecan coffee cake, this recipe looks a lot longer than it is. The instructions take up both sides of the index card, but we were already putting the crust into the oven before we knew it. I thought our carrots would have time to cool before we got around to using them, but they had barely finished their time in the microwave.

Pumpkin pies have superseded carrot cakes as my preferred method of getting the damn things out of the refrigerator. A carrot cake uses one or two carrots in a whole dessert. But with a pie, you will pulverize at least half a dozen of them into your recipe. Until I can put a stop to the carrots that apparently breed like rabbits, we will have a lot of I-can't-believe-it's-not-pumpkin pies.

I was going to put the milk, eggs, and carrots into the blender all at once. But since the carrots were still hot, I instead blenderized them with just the milk first. The resulting carrot paste was too thick to properly liquefy, but the milk cooled the carrots down enough to avoid prematurely cooking the eggs.

Our resulting spiced mixture was a lovely bright orange and tasted understated yet nice. Like our previous batch of carrot tarts, the pie filling was a lot thicker than the pumpkin pie made with actual pumpkin. As you can see, the sugar and spices sat on top of it instead of sinking in.

Not only does this recipe go by a lot quicker than the long instructions suggest, when you use carrots instead of pumpkin it also bakes very fast. The recipe says to bake for fifteen minutes and then sprinkle on the topping. I found that at the end of those fifteen minutes, the "pumpkin"-spice bars were already completely set. I sprinkled the nuts on top and returned the pan to the oven for the butter and sugar to melt into place. While I was concerned that the eggs would curdle, I told myself that in the original instructions, our pumpkin bars would have spent over twice as long in the oven with no ill effect.

So... this recipe doesn't make bar cookies, even though that's what's written at the top of the card. It makes a pumpkin pie with an oatmeal shortbread crust. If you doubled the recipe back to its original quantity and made it in a 9x13 pan, you still wouldn't get pumpkin-spice bars. You would get a rectangular pumpkin pie.

But with that said, it's really good. The oatmeal crust wasn't as sweet as cookies, and therefore it was a perfect counterpoint to the pie filling. The toasted pecans on top (I refuse to voluntarily eat walnuts) were really good. The pie filling itself, while perfectly fine, wasn't quite as good as the pumpkin pie recipe I clipped out of the newspaper (well, screen-grabbed from the newspaper. It was a bit bland. I would swap out the filling with Louise Bennett Weaver's recipe from the 1933 newspaper. Simply cut the pie filling down by a third (that is, reduce the eggs from three to two, and adjust the other ingredient amounts to match).

I really like the idea of this recipe a lot. It's delicious, and really easy. If you can't roll out a pie crust (or don't want to bother), it's a great way to have pumpkin pie without a rolling pin. I don't know why this recipe was called "bar cookies" instead of a pie, but it's a really good pie and so easy to make.