Magic Cookie Program Review

Have you ever had magic cookie bars, hello dolly bars or seven layer bars?  They're all the same thing generally consisting of a graham cracker crust, chocolate chips (and sometimes other baking chips as well), shredded coconut and chopped nuts all drizzled with sweetened condensed milk and baked until they stick together in a bar cookie.

Last year I wanted to do a cookie review activity where the kids earned ingredients for cookies for every program song they passed off.  Originally I was thinking they would earn ingredients like flour, sugar, butter,... then I though that it would be even more fun if they could choose ingredients to make their own custom cookie.  Enter the magic cookies!  Okay, I grew up calling these cookies hello dolly bars, but I figured magic cookies would be more fun for primary.

Since these cookies are just a bunch of ingredients stuck together with sweetened condensed milk I figured they could be made with just about anything. In fact there are already many different kinds of magic cookie bars.  My primary would make their own, custom magic cookie bars as our program review.  This versatility also meant these could be adjusted to be allergy friendly as we had several kids in our primary with various allergies. More on that later.

The basic recipe for magic cookie bars is:

1/2 stick butter
1 1/2 cup crumbs
2 cups baking chips
2 cups dry chunks
sprinkle of extra
14 oz can sweetened condensed milk

Crumbs can be any ground up crunchy cookie like graham crackers, nilla wafers, shortbread, chocolate wafers, gingersnaps, teddy grahams,...

Baking Chips can be chocolate, white chocolate, cinnamon, mint, butterscotch, peanut butter,....

Dry Chunks can be shredded coconut, rolled oats, chopped nuts, crushed pretzels, crushed oreos,...

Extra can be anything colorful and small you sprinkle over the top to make the bars look fun, like sprinkle or mini M&Ms.  It can also be things that will melt and stick of their own accord without needing more sweetened condensed milk, like mini marshmallows.

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.
2. Melt the butter and combine it with the crumbs.  Press the mixture into the bottom of a 9 x 13 inch pan.
3. Sprinkle the baking chips evenly over the crust.  Then sprinkle the dry chunks over the baking chips.  
4. Drizzle the sweetened condensed milk evenly over the pan.  Sprinkle the extra on top.
5. Bake for 25 minutes until golden around the edges.
6. Let cool completely before cutting into bars and serving.

How to turn this into a review activity

Now that you have the basic activity here's how you review with it.  First make a list of your songs and pick two ingredients to go with each song.  Make sure to pick only ingredients that will work well with each other.  You want the cookies to taste good no matter what the kids pick.  Mint and butterscotch sounded like a terrible combination, so I wanted to make sure it couldn't happen.  I did not offer mint as one of the options at all since it doesn't work well with a lot of other flavors.  I left cinnamon out for this reason as well.  Here's our song list and the options I offered for each one.

Nephi's Courage - graham crackers or nilla wafers for the crust
When I am Baptized - crushed pretzels or chopped pecans
Choose the Right - shredded coconut or rolled oats
Teacher Do You Love Me? - crushed Oreos or mini marshmallows
Little Lambs so White and Fair - chocolate or peanut butter chips
I'm Trying to be Like Jesus - white chocolate chips or mini M&Ms

Make your poster

I made two posters, one for junior and one for senior.  I have to make a double batch to have enough for everyone anyway, so I was planning on making two custom cookies.  However, both primaries chose all the same ingredients, which made things easy.

I created all the components for the posters on the computer, printed them and assembled them on posterboard.  I'm including the file without the song names so you can use it to create your own.

Cookie Review Poster PDF

Using photos I found online I created a heading with the song name with the pictures of its two ingredients underneath it.

I printed these out for all the songs and glued them to a piece of posterboard.  I did the junior on one side and the senior on the other, so I would only have one poster to deal with.

Then I made strips of paper to cover the ingredients with the requirements to pass off the song written on them.  I prefer to tell them to sing strong rather than loud.

I then attached these strips to the poster to cover each ingredients.  These strips will be pulled off as they pass off the songs, so don't glue them directly to the picture.  Instead I put thin strip from a glue stick on the left and right sides of the strips and attached them to the poster over the ingredient picture.  That way the strip is only attached on the sides and can be easily pulled off to reveal the picture without damaging it.

The poster is ready.

Using it in primary


To introduce this I explained magic cookie bars to the kids including showing them a picture of the cookies on my tablet.  I then explained that this type of cookie can be made with all different type of ingredients and that they would be able to earn and choose ingredients for their own specialized cookies by passing of the program songs.

I explained to the kids that I wanted them to sing strong (loud but still beautiful), they needed to know all the words and everyone needed to be singing to pass off a song.  When they passed off a song I would remove the strip covering one of the ingredients.  When they passed of the song a second time and both ingredients were revealed then they voted on which ingredient they wanted in their cookies.  There were a couple songs where they wanted both ingredients (like the Oreos and mini marshmallows).  When this happened I told them if they could pass of the song a third time they could have both ingredients.  I thought this might be a possibility and intentionally put this pair of ingredients with the hardest song.

Our cookies ended up with the following:

nilla wafer crust
chocolate chips
peanut butter chips
white chocolate chips
crushed pretzels
crushed Oreos
mini M&Ms
mini marshmallow

They were loaded!  The kids did not want either the coconut or the rolled oats, so if I were doing this again I might switch that choice out for something else.  Or, maybe but the coconut and rolled oats up against more popular options.  The cookies were delicious, and the kids had a blast deciding what they wanted in their special cookies.

Making them allergy friendly

Our primary had a number of allergies and one nice thing about these cookies being to flexible is that they are pretty easy to make allergy friendly. The most important thing when dealing with allergies is communication with parents of the child with allergies. I talked with the parents every step of the way to make sure the ingredients I was using were okay.  I also let the parents know that while I would use allergy-friendly ingredients and do my absolute best to avoid cross-contamination, my kitchen is not allergen free.  They let me know that was fine.

Peanut Free

One child was allergic to peanuts.  His mom said that he doesn't need special peanut-free chocolate chips or anything.  There just couldn't be chunks of peanuts or peanut butter in the cookies.  His cookies were easy.  I simply made a small pan with no peanut butter chips.

Gluten, Dairy and Nut Free

There were several children with this restriction.  Fortunately there are a lot of gluten-free options now and they tend to be friendly to other allergies as well.

I found gluten-free pretzels, sandwich cookies (like Oreos) and nilla wafers at Walmart.  They all were also dairy and nut free.

Enjoy Life is a brand of allergen-free chocolate chips.  I've bought them online before, but I am seeing them in store more and more often, including Walmart.

Peanut butter chips were obviously not an option.  I couldn't find a good substitute for white chocolate chips, but the parents said their kids wouldn't care about that.  I left them out altogether.

I verified that Crisco would be an acceptable substitute for butter in the crust.  Coconut oil is a possibility too, but it can be difficult to bake with since it is not always solid at room temperature.  This can impact the texture of the finished baked good.

Marshmallows already meet all these requirements.  M&Ms were tricky.  I couldn't find a good, allergy-friendly substitute.  After talking with the parents they said the amount matters, and that since there are only a few M&Ms per cookie it wouldn't be a problem.  You may have to leave this off, or maybe consider sprinkles if that works for your child.

The sweetened condensed milk was the most difficult part.  There is vegan, sweetened, condensed milk made from coconut milk.  It's available online and maybe in some health-food stores.  I couldn't find it locally and didn't want to pay for shipping so I made my own.

Here's a recipe for it.  I didn't want to have to hover over the stove to make sure it didn't burn for 45 minutes, so I did it in a crockpot instead.  I put 14 oz full-fat coconut milk and 1/3 cup sugar in a small crockpot at high heat.  I let it simmer uncovered all day, stirring occasionally and scrapping down the sides until the liquid was reduced by half.  This was really easy and required very little work from me.

I made a small pan of the gluten, dairy and nut free cookies and they turned out great.  All the kids had fun sampling their custom cookies and I had a great time making them for them.

Let me know if you have any questions, and if you try this activity with your kids, I'd love to hear about it!