I made these for a birthday. I wasn’t about to let it go unnoticed – the birthday girl in question had sent out an Outlook reminder to all her friends so we wouldn’t forget – and I hadn’t made it to her party. So I brought her these 7-layer bars and told her they were hers to do with as she wished. She could eat them all herself, set them out publicly, or just share them with people she liked and nobody she didn’t like.

The original recipe, and an enlightening explanation of what each of the 7 layers is, can be found here, although I did change a little bit – I don’t like white chocolate, but I do love peanut butter chips, so I made the substitution there. That’s it, though. Oh wait, no, I was short on butter so I used less and it was fine. I can’t remember exactly how much I used, so I’ll write down what I think I did. I considered substituting something for the butterscotch chips because I don’t really care about them, but Matt convinced me they should stay.

7-Layer Bars

Ingredients
1 cup sweetened shredded coconut
4 or 5 tbsp melted butter
5 graham crackers (the attached pairs, not 5 actual crackers, apparently those don’t count as a whole cracker…), crushed
1 cup chopped walnuts
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
1/2 cup butterscotch chips
1/2 cup peanut butter chips
1 14-oz can sweetened condensed milk

Method
Preheat oven to 350.
Spray a 9×13 pan with cooking spray, then line it with tinfoil, leaving some overhang to grab later when removing the bars from the pan, and spray that with cooking spray. You are taking no chances here! Except we already use the kind of tinfoil that has a non-stick side, so I just lined it with the non-stick side facing up and didn’t bother spraying the second time. It worked fine.
Toast your coconut shreds on a baking sheet for about 4 minutes or until they just start to go brown. I did this in the toaster oven since my regular oven doesn’t have a window, and you kind of need to keep an eye on these bad boys.
Combine the melted butter and the crushed graham crackers (I used my food processor to savage the graham crackers, by the way) until the butter is evenly distributed.
Press the crumb mixture evenly into the bottom of the foil-lined pan.
Now it’s time to do the layers. They’re not going to wind up super layery because you won’t have enough to completely cover the surface with any one thing, so just distribute the toppings as evenly as you can.
First, the walnuts.
Next, the chocolate chips.
Then, the peanut butter chips.
Now, the butterscotch chips.
Finally, the coconut.
Now douse the entire thing in sweetened condensed milk.
Bake for about 25 minutes or until the top is golden brown.
Cool in the pan on a rack for about 2 hours. I know that seems like a hundred years but trust me. It’s way too melty to cut earlier.
When it’s time to cut them, you can hoist them out of the pan using the edges of the tinfoil.

And on a side note, this is post #100 in this blog! Maybe I’ll do something cool for it in the next post.