Spatulas and Stethoscopes: Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

Tomorrow is my last day on the OB floor, super bittersweet. I'll be moving on to gyne surgery and clinic for the next two weeks, then leaving OB/GYN in my rearview mirror, headed for PEDS!!! Anywho, I'll miss many of the residents and staff that I've been working with on labor and delivery, so how does a good Polish girl express these emotions? Through baked goods, of course. Now, here is another example of why it is brilliant to P-L-A-N out meals and baking extravaganzas the weekend before....so you don't need to go begging for eggs from a lovely friend named Jamie on floor 10. But as it stands, I came home, decided I had almost all the ingredients to make chocolate chip cookie bars, found some eggs, and got to work.

Bars look great and are easy to eat, but truthfully, they are a lazy-person's cookie. Think about it: you make the same dough, but instead of having 3 pans and multiple batches in the oven, you smush the entire batter into one pan, throw it in the oven, (leave a dollop in the mixing bowl to "sample") and you're done!

I just made the cookie recipe from the back of a Nestle's white chocolate swirl chips bag (or the recipe found on the back of ANY chocolate chip bag...or the recipe your grandma always used...or the recipe you found on line...whatever, you can find a chocolate chip cookie recipe). When the dough was done, I spread about 2/3 into the bottom of a 9x13" pan. To the remaining dough, I beat in 1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, and placed large "blobs" on top of the white dough.

Then, using a knife, spoon, your (clean) hands, and a little ingenuity, spread and swirl the chocolate dough into the white dough. It'll take a minute, be patient, but don't mix so much that you end up with one colored dough. We need a swirl effect here, people. I sprinkled the top with more chips. Why not?