Salted Caramel Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars

I adore my kids. I love baking. I deeply enjoy baking with my kids. It’s a hobby we can do together and it teaches them practical life skills. I get a chance to teach them how to read recipes, measure ingredients, follow instructions, keep their hands sanitary, etc.  And, I get to teach them that at the very end if they do all of those things well they eventually get to lick the spoon!  <---- Really, isn’t that half the reason we bake?

And, as an added bonus sometimes they get to do cool things like enter their treats into the fair and come home with a Grand Champion ribbon like Titus did last Summer.

Or, they can bake up some amazing Salted Caramel Chocolate Chip Cookie Bars and sell them at a dessert auction for ridiculous amounts of money to help send a team of people (including Rob) on a mission trip to Africa!

I posted this picture to facebook yesterday from my fancy new phone (sorry, I don’t know how to edit the pictures from there, but he’s still adorable unedited in my book!). I mentioned that Titus had a goal of raising $100 for the auction. I thought it was a lofty goal, but more likely to be attainable than his sister’s $1,000 goal.

I could stare at his adorable 7 year-old handwriting forever. And that self portrait? Makes a mommy’s heart just melt!

Sorry, back to the cookie bars: It turns out his goal wasn’t so lofty! A very generous family bid $150 on these cookie bars! I took him over to the bid sheet to show him and he looked up at me with an enormous grin, “One HUNDRED and FIFTY dollars? Seriously?”

“Do I get to keep it?” he inquired.

I had to remind him that the money raised was going to support the missions team on their trip to Africa this summer, which he had apparently forgotten about in all of the excitement!

In the end, Titus’ dessert went for even more than my fancy cakes and his sister’s famous toffee. All in all, the kids and I baked goods that sold for about $585! Okay, okay, it has little to do with our desserts being that delicious and more to do with God using generous people to provide to do his work. I’m fully aware of that!

Not to say that these aren’t delicious, because they are. Quite delicious in my book! They are definitely worth making, and eating, and selling and sharing!

If you are interested in making some yourself you can find the recipe here. If you’re interested in Titus making some for you in return for a donation to his daddy’s mission trip, just let us know and we’ll happily make some for you!

The kids and I have a goal of raising at least $500 to help send Rob on his trip and we’ll happy fulfill any baking order requests to help us meet this goal!