For Canada, my Canadian friend Elaine suggested I make Nanaimo bars which are 100% Canadian and named after the city of Nanaimo, British Columbia. Learned something new – which I always love. Seems like Nanaimo bars are to Canada as chocolate chip cookies are to the US. I had never heard of them before as I am much more familiar with food from Quebec, but figured what the heck. Nanaimo bars fall in the dessert category and have 3 layers, the bottom layer with crumbled graham crackers, nuts, cocoa, sugar and butter, the next layer is simply American buttercream, but for some reason they mix in powdered vanilla custad (I think were I to make it again, I would just use vanilla extract). Additionally, I would make sure that you refrigerate the combo of layers 1 and 2 for a solid hour before attempting to apply the chocolate gnash or it will melt the buttercream. I would also let the gnash cool down a tiny bit before spreading it so it does not melt the buttercream. The last layer is a chocolate gnash, which sounds fancy but is just melted chocolate and butter, although every recipe I saw had proportions of butter to chocolate that would make (and did make the mixture) unspreadable, so I added more butter. Scott and Eva love them. I thought they were ok, kind of reminiscent of a glorified oreo. For the amount of work, I would jut buy a pack of oreos in the future. But glad I gave it a whirl. A few people asked for step by step pictures – you can see them below. Here is a link to the recipe I used. I looked at a number of them and they were all essentially the same. https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/25095/nanaimo-bars-iii/
