O' Henry Bars, Easy and O' So Good

First, a couple of facts about the results of our KidsPost No-Bake Cookie Contest -- ones that cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn would proclaim "about as obvious as a hand grenade in a bowl of oatmeal":

Concoctions of peanut butter, chocolate chips, breakfast cereals and oatmeal loomed large.

Plenty of young people are cooking out there, re-creating recipes that come most often by way of older family members.

In the end, the choices came down to two. The runner-up recipe was Peanut Butter Trail Mix Bars, submitted by Silver Spring resident Annette Warder. The bars are made with sunflower seeds, puffed wheat, oatmeal, raisins, unsweetened coconut, maple syrup and some of the ingredients we mentioned earlier. Warder got the recipe from her daughter-in-law, who got it from her sister, who saw a version in a health-food store flier in Knoxville, Tenn. It makes cookies that are chewy, chocolaty and full of enough good things to lessen any guilt involved in consuming them. (Tune in to our online chat at 1 p.m. today and we'll share Warder's recipe.)

What won the day was the recipe for O' Henry Bars, submitted by Sarah Bradley Douglas, 12, of Richmond. Here's why:

Sarah Bradley learned to make the O' Henry Bars from Nana B., her grandmother. The bar cookies pay homage to the taste of Nestle's original Oh Henry! candy bars, which feature a milk-chocolate-coated peanut butter fudge. Variations on this recipe are decades old and can include brown sugar, vanilla, chunky peanut butter, chopped peanuts, oatmeal, salt, butter or Rice Krispies.

However, we appreciated the simplicity of proportions and flavors in the version Sarah Bradley uses: a boiled blend of corn syrup, sugar and creamy peanut butter for the base, with a nice, smooth combination of butterscotch and semisweet chocolate chips for the topping. A cup of this, a jar of that, a couple of bags of chips and you're done.

Sarah Bradley and her grandmother, Barbara Brown of Williamsburg, prefer cutting the cookies into small squares, and, once we computed the nutritional analysis, we say amen to that.

Sarah Bradley lives with her mom, dad and sisters Maddy, 10, and twins Hannah and Gracie, 7, who all reap the benefits of the time she loves to spend in the kitchen. Left to her own devices on a weekend afternoon, Sarah Bradley will bake. She recently made a cake, reports her mom, Susan, including frosting made from scratch.

When we spoke with the polite Tuckahoe Middle School seventh-grader by phone last week, in fact, she and a friend were making chocolate chip cookies.

"I've been making O' Henry Bars with my grandma since I was 5," Sarah Bradley said. "We make them all the time, not just at Christmas. And my sisters are always standing right beside me, wanting to help."

O' Henry Bars