Rekha's 7 Layer Christmas Crack Cookies

In the 3rd grade, my best friend Denise Yaag gave me a recipe that I've used till this day. Actually, Denise gave me 2 recipes that I still use. The first was melted Swiss cheese atop toasted bread. Before you nourish thoughts of ridicule for my early culinary efforts let me tell you this. I cooked my first Indian meal, completely unaided, in the 3rd grade. It consisted of Keema curry with the traditional green peas served over hot rice. Did I follow a recipe? Was I supervised? Nope. I just hit the fridge and concocted the meal to surprise my parents for dinner on a school night. Mom and Dad gushed over my budding skills as they chowed on a hot Telugu meal. Thus my culinary precociousness was born.

Anyhoo. The other recipe Denise shared with me was a recipe she called 7 Layer Cookies. The first time I tasted them I knew I would arm-wrestle to the death to own it. Luckily Denise was not a stingy or possessive friend and gladly wrote the ingredients in her curvy, very feminine handwriting. The first time I made them was a culinary coup. They surpassed even my puerile curry attempts. After tasting the cookies (odd for a cookie, even to an Indian family like us whose only notion of cookies were shortbread biscuits so stony they had to be dipped in hot milk to consume) the family sat around the table and stared at the baking sheet. Could something this sublime be composed of chocolate, crumbs and milk? More importantly, my family acknowledged for the first time that smack-your-lips delicious food could come from a country other than India.

20 years later... ahem, I mean 30 years later I still make them every Christmas. The house smells like chocolate, butterscotch and oddly, sex. Or perhaps it's just my perception of how the cookies make me feel. For those of you who don't like chocolate (aghast!) or sustain allergies like my walnut-averse friend Sheila, please substitute at will.

Ingredients:

1 12 oz bag 60% Cacao Ghiradelli chocolate chips. Nestle's semi sweet chocolate can be substituted and indeed I used the old standby for decades until I got turned on to the superior depth of Ghiradelli. You can find these in most supermarkets these days for the same price.

1 10 oz bag Nestle Butterscotch chips.

1 stick salted butter melted

3 cups Graham crackers ground in a food processor.

1 can sweetened condensed milk. Either Eagle or Carnation is fine.

1 cup chopped walnuts. Pecans, almonds, pistachios or other nuts can be used as well. If you're an aficiendo of nuts, use more than a cup if desired.

Directions:

Pour melted butter in a 16 x 9 inch baking sheet with at least 1 inch raised edges. Distribute butter evenly. Scatter cracker crumbs evenly across sheet. Sprinkle Butterscotch chips in an even layer. Sprinkly chocolate chips in an even layer. Then scatter nuts evenly. Evenly pour condensed milk over entire confection slowly so that thick ribbons cascade over the layers. This is important as the milk must penetrate through all the layers or else the cookies will not stick together.

Bake in a preheated 325 degree oven for 25 minutes or until cookies are a light brown but not burnt at the edges.

If you're paying close attention you might notice I've only listed 6 ingredients. There is an additional layer and that is sweetened coconut. However I've always felt it pushed the limits of this sweet over the top and do not include it in my concoctions. So! as they say in the biz, the 7th ingredient is love. Awwwwww.