Angel Slices by Maya Corrigan #Recipe

Today I'm sharing a recipe for my family's favorite cookie. The recipe comes from a 1960s edition of Joy of Cooking. Some later editions modified the ingredients and called the cookies Dream Bars or Angel Bars. We like the old version best. What began as a Christmas cookie is now a year-round favorite. I took these photos when my daughter baked the cookies while visiting us during spring break.

Ingredients

For the dough:

½ cup butter
¼ cup sugar
1 egg
½ teaspoon vanilla
1 ¼ cups all-purpose flour
1/8 teaspoon salt

For the topping:

2 beaten eggs
1 ½ cups brown sugar
½ cup flaked coconut
1 cup chopped pecans
2 tablespoons flour
½ teaspoon any baking powder
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla

For the glaze: 

1 ½ cups confectioners’ sugar.

Juice of a fresh lemon. 

Note: I accidentally left a lemon out of the photo below, but it's essential.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees 

Cream the butter and sugar until blended. Beat in the egg, and add the vanilla.

Combine the flour and salt and then add the flour to the butter-sugar mixture.

Pat the dough into a buttered 9 X12-inch pan, or as shown in the photo below. 

Tip: Lining a lightly greased pan with parchment paper before putting in the dough will make removing the cookies easier. 

Bake the dough for 15 minutes at 350 F.

While the dough is baking, combine all the ingredients for the topping. If you don't care for coconut, add an extra half cup of pecans. 

After the dough has baked for 15 minutes, spread the nut mixture on the warm dough and bake an additional 20-25 minutes.

Make the glaze: Combine 1 ½ cups sifted or unsifted confectioners’ sugar with enough fresh lemon juice to make it a dripping consistency. 

When the dough is cool, drizzle the sugar and lemon mix over it. 

Use a hot knife to cut the baked dough into bars or squares. 

READERS: Do you have a dessert or another dish that you still make years after you first tried it?

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Maya Corrigan writes the Five-Ingredient Mystery series. It features a young cafe manager and her young-at-heart grandfather solving murders in a Chesapeake Bay town. Each book has five suspects, five clues, and Granddad’s five-ingredient recipes. Maya has taught college courses in writing, literature, and detective fiction. When not reading and writing, she enjoys theater, travel, trivia, cooking, and crosswords.

Visit her website for book news, mystery history and trivia, and easy recipes. Sign up for her newsletter there. She gives away a free book to one subscriber each time she sends out a newsletter. Follow her on Facebook.

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime.  

Praise for A Parfait Crime

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