First Drafts at Quitterbread Bars (Mostly Nonsense)

This is a continuation of the experiment in trying to bake treats invented by The AI Weirdness neural net. (Scroll down to cookies post.)

I made two versions, incorporating various perspectives on the notion, including my own preoccupation with yeast and sazerac's suggestion about shortbread and marmalade.



It's all a little rustic and perhaps slightly reminiscent of Mendl's confections in The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Draft 1: A Loaf of Quitterbread

This is the big loaf in the photo (since cut into slices)

-Yeast-based nutmeg-flavoured coffee cake recipe from Le Internet
-Orange glaze


I liked this. It had the nice median feel between bread and cake that seemed important for quitterbread.

I do not think I raised my yeast quite right, and the recipe seemed to call for about twice as much flour as was necessary. The result is thus quite dense, but I like dense cake.

I looked at various recipes, including Ghanian butter bread, whence I got the nutmeg.

I think I'll make another draft of this with more spices and more upstanding yeast.

Pro: Definitely gives the sense that I started making bread and then quit
Con: These are clearly slices and not bars.

Can I just layer the slices? I feel like the grain would be going the wrong way or something.

Draft 2: Quitter(short)bread Sandwich Bars

These are the little square things. This is layers of the family shortbread recipe with apricot jam-orange buttercream icing in between the layers, to imitate the picture a little:



There wasn't very much jam (it was a tiny sample jar, not the gift jam) -- hence adding the orange.

I got worried that they weren't fancy enough, so I melted some chocolate and mixed it with pecans and draped that over some of them. Then I realized that I'd forgotten to sweeten the chocolate. However, the layers under the chocolate are so sweet that it doesn't actually matter.

Pro: I mean, shortbread.
Con: These are more bar-y, but still not very bar-y.

What makes a bar a bar?

sazerac's actual suggestion involved jam and royal icing, and that would be more bar-ish. I just didn't have enough experimental jam in the moment. I now have many, many egg whites, so I could definitely try that.

Maybe I want a layer of shortbread, then jam, then cake, then icing...

And other important issues -- sorry. I'm just enjoying fussing about something totally frivolous and low-pressure creative.

{rf}