SWEET BLISS
Make wellknown seasonal Starbucks treat right at home.
Peppermint white chocolate mochas and eggnog lattes are certainly top sellers this time of year at the 13,000-plus Starbucks outlets nationwide.
But what lures many devotees into the nation’s largest coffee chain during November and December is the company’s seasonal bakedgood behemoth, the Cranberry Bliss Bar.
And why not? It’s brilliant, and irresistible: a moist, dense, blondie-like base that’s enriched with white chocolate and crystallized ginger. A lavish cream cheese icing is tickled with citrus and finished with a decadent white chocolate drizzle. And there’s plenty of festive, seasonally appropriate dried cranberries. It has been making the season merry for years.
For those interested in re-creating baked “Bliss” at home, forget about getting the recipe from Starbucks; the company did not return requests for so much as a morsel of information regarding its über-popular holiday baked goodie.
Thankfully, the Oregonian newspaper in Portland wasn’t nearly as reticent.
“I know the whole story of this particular recipe,” said food and entertainment writer Grant Butler.
Type “Cranberry Bliss Bar recipe” into Google, and page after page of facsimiles pop up. The one that bakers should rely upon originates with the Oregonian. Eleven years ago, Linda Faus, then the paper’s test kitchen director, was publishing a column that re-created restaurant dishes.
“She had numerous requests for Cranberry Bliss Bars, but she couldn’t get Starbucks to share the recipe,” said Butler. “That’s when she decided to crack the code herself.”
Aided by test kitchen assistant Nathan Hostler, Faus got to work, with colleagues providing feedback as they enjoyed each variation. The resulting recipe was an instant — and, as it turns out, enduring — hit. Still, Cranberry Ecstasy Bars isn’t the newspaper’s mostrequested recipe; that honor belongs to a buttermilk biscuit formula (find it at bit. ly/2i1l7kM).
“But it’s in our Top Five, for sure,” said Butler. “It’s certainly better than the Cranberry Bliss Bar sold at Starbucks. Think about it. The Starbucks version was baked who knows how long ago in a factory, where it was frozen, and then later thawed at the store. Linda’s version is fresh. They’re insanely great.”