How to make perfect nanaimo bars – recipe | Snacks

Canadians are famously nice – think laid-back Keanu Reeves, sunny Pamela Anderson, the charmingly incompetent Inspector Gadget – except when it comes to their beloved nanaimo bars. Get the ratio of this three-tier national treasure wrong, as the New York Times stood accused of doing in 2021, when its Instagram account posted a picture of squares that one user described as “an insult to Canadians everywhere”, and you’ll discover you can push them only so far.

The Times is not alone in attracting ire. So popular are nanaimo (pronounced nuh-NYE-mo) bars, named after the British Colombian logging and mining town where they are said to have originated, that Canada Post put them on a stamp in 2019 … only to face similar howls of outrage, albeit in Canadian: “One hesitates to be critical,” Nanaimo’s mayor explained carefully, “but it’s not a very accurate depiction.”

In short, Canadians, who in 2006 voted the nanaimo bar the “nation’s favourite confection”, feel very strongly about these sugary little treats, a mainstay of kids’ birthday parties, wedding buffets and funeral teas from Nanaimo to Nova Scotia, though if Justin Trudeau had any problem with the version served up by White House chefs during his state dinner with Barack Obama in 2016, he was too polite to say so. Please don’t hold back in the comments below – I’m British, I can take it.

The base

Before I tasted a nanaimo bar, I had assumed that the base, whose principal ingredients are biscuit and desiccated coconut, was the kind of crunchy affair usually found on the bottom of cheesecakes. I was wrong. With the exception of the Canadian Living recipe, which sticks it in the oven for 10 minutes to dry it out, the nanaimo relies on the coagulating power of refrigeration, rather than on heat.

Revelation two: instead of the large lumps of biscuit suspended in chocolate that one might expect in a British fridge cake, this base is made from fine crumbs soaked in sweet, cocoa-flavoured butter, giving it a soft, almost squidgy texture. Once I’ve come to terms with this fact (I do love a crunchy base), I need to decide the best replacement for the graham cracker crumbs demanded by Canadian recipes. Graham (pronounced “gram”) crackers, are a peculiarly north American phenomenon named after what the Encyclopedia Britannica describes as the “eccentric … clergyman and health reformer” Sylvester Graham, who travelled around early 19th-century New England warning against the dangers of lust, as incited by, among other things, refined sugars and grains. His unsweetened, fatless crackers were made from coarsely ground wholemeal wheat flour. Modern equivalents, Britannica explains, “would likely be unrecognisable to Graham, as they are typically made with refined white flour, sugar and trans fats, and are flavoured with honey or cinnamon; chocolate varieties are also common”.

They are also £18 a box online, excluding delivery, which means they will not feature in my recipe, though I do buy a bag of graham cracker crumbs to try to work out the nearest equivalent. To my surprise, they’re a fine, if slightly gritty powder, rather than a crumb, with a flavour somewhere between a British digestive and a rich tea biscuit. The original texture feels somewhat irrelevant, so, having given rich tea, digestives and Hobnobs (a suggestion from the Cupcake Jemma team here in the UK) a try, I conclude that you should go with whichever takes your fancy. Personally, I enjoy the more restrained sweetness of a rich tea, but you might yearn for the oaty nubbliness of a Hobnob or the more malty flavour of a digestive. That said, I’ve deliberately left in a few larger chunks to give the base a more interesting texture, which may be offensive to nanaimo purists – in which case, keep whizzing.

(I do try baking my own graham crackers using a recipe from Deb at Smitten Kitchen, which, for some reason, possibly relating to metric conversions, end up sticky, chewy and hard to grind – they taste good, but as far as I’m concerned they add an unnecessary layer of complexity to proceedings; the nanaimo bar was designed to use processed ingredients, and I’m happy to let that spirit live on in mine.)

The biscuits are bulked out by that typically British Columbian ingredient, coconut – the Zingerman’s Bakehouse Celebrate Every Day book calls for fresh, chef Susan Mendelson, whose recipe Margaret Atwood included in her 1987 Canlit Foodbook, unsweetened shredded stuff, and Serious Eats and Canadian Living magazine advise the more moist, sweetened kind. The last is not readily available in the UK, but nigella.com says you can readily substitute it by stirring sugar and hot water into the desiccated stuff. Fresh coconut leaves the biscuit layer too wet, and almost like trifle, while the sweetened sort only adds to the sugar content, so straightforward desiccated feels the best and easiest choice.

Nuts also feature. Atwood, the New York Times confides, favours walnuts, but Joyce Hardcastle, whose recipe won a nanaimo contest to nail down an official version back in 1986, specifies finely chopped almonds, while Mendelson offers a choice of “finely chopped walnuts, almonds or pecans (or a mixture)”. Like the great novelist, I have a strong preference for the bitterness of walnuts, which echo and enhance those in the cocoa, making for a pleasingly rich, almost fruity contrast with the sweetness of the other layers. Toast them, as Zingerman’s suggests, to really bring out their flavour and, while you’re at it, why not do the same with the coconut?

On binding and thickness

The crumbs, coconut and nuts are suspended in a kind of ganache made from melted butter stirred over heat with sugar and egg, and flavoured with cocoa powder. The most popular base is Mendelson’s from the New York Times, which contains the lowest ratio of butter and sugar to nuts and crumbs, though I will be increasing the cocoa content slightly to ramp up those bitter notes. I don’t see any benefit in baking it, though; that just makes it crumbly and hard to cut.

At the risk of provoking Canadian ire – I’m desperate to come and visit, so this is a risky business – the base absolutely should be thicker than the custard or chocolate, because these are, in truth, mere icings, gilding the lily with sweetness and fat. Too much of a good thing is still too much, unless you spend all day working outside in sub-zero temperatures. Then you get a pass.

The custard

Spoiler alert: this isn’t actually custard, it’s custard-flavoured buttercream – and, in my opinion, and the considered opinion of my testers, the main cause of the common complaint that nanaimo bars are, as the New York Times put it delicately, “tremendously sweet” (this from the country that invented marshmallow fluff). That’s because most of the recipes I try cram icing (powdered) sugar into butter at a ratio of 8:1 – for context, Mary Berry’s buttercream uses two parts icing sugar to one part butter. Only Hardcastle and the Serious Eats version, by Canadian writer and former bakery owner Molly Allen, suggest a more restrained 4:1, though I’ve reduced the sugar content even further to suit my own taste. If you feel it’s lacking, feel free to adjust it as you go. Bonus: a lower sugar content makes for a lighter consistency, particularly if, as in those same two recipes, you loosen it with milk rather than double cream.

Note that almost every recipe I try, with the exception of Canadian Living, specifies unsalted butter, with Hardcastle going as far as to call for “European-style cultured” butter, which has been allowed to ferment before churning, giving it a slightly tangier, more complex flavour. This, I have no hesitation in telling you, is a complete waste of money, because no one is able to detect anything about the butter once it’s been drowned in sugar. Only Allen recommends including some salt to balance all the sweetness – personally, I’d just use salted butter to begin with anyway, not least because that’s what I keep on hand, but, however you include it, salt is a must.

The unusual part about the nanaimo bar is the use of custard powder as a flavouring; traditionally, our very own Bird’s, which suits me just fine. American recipes often propose “vanilla pudding mix” as a substitute, but for once I have just the thing on the shelf already. As a cornflour custard devotee, I’d recommend dissolving it, along with some sugar, in milk before whipping it in, to avoid that slightly powdery finish common to all those I try.

Allen and Canadian Living are also unusual in using vanilla extract to ramp up the custard powder’s “flavouring”. For me, one of the charms of Bird’s custard is this nostalgic artificial vanilla flavour, but if you avoid ultra-processed foods, then by all means use cornflour and genuine vanilla extract instead, but otherwise I see no reason to spoil things with the real, highly perfumed deal.

The chocolate

Chocolate is chocolate – for me, 70% cocoa and butter makes a fine topping. You could experiment with adding flavourings such as orange zest or the New York Times’ sea salt, though I don’t think the combination of nutmeg and custard can be improved upon.

The construction and slicing

The single most important thing I learn in this whole process is patience. Chill each layer thoroughly before adding the next, and everything will be much easier, a detail tactfully omitted from many of the recipes I try. (If you’re Canadian, no doubt you just know.) The crumb layer needs to be solid enough for the buttercream to spread easily on top, and the buttercream should be firm enough to take the warm chocolate afterwards without melting into it. Oh, and line that tin, unless you want to end up with scratches.

As Allen notes, nanaimo bars are best served cold from the fridge, rather than at room temperature, whatever some recipes claim. “You can also let them come to room temperature for several minutes, if you prefer, you’ll just have to be prepared for very soft chocolate and custard layers,” she allows, though perhaps my fridge is Canadian room temperature. Who knows?

Perfect nanaimo bars

Prep 40 min
Chill 2 hr+
Makes About 16

For the base
75g shelled walnuts, or nuts of your choice
75g desiccated coconut
225g plain biscuits – I use rich tea
100g butter, cubed – I use salted
50g sugar
30g cocoa powder
A pinch of salt
1 egg, beaten

For the custard layer
80g soft room-temperature butter – I use salted
160g icing sugar, sifted
3 tbsp custard powder
2 tbsp milk
A pinch of salt

For the topping
120g 70% cocoa chocolate
2 tbsp butter
Freshly grated nutmeg, to taste (optional)

Heat the walnuts in a dry pan over a medium flame, shaking occasionally, until you can smell them toasting. Tip out and leave to cool slightly. In the same pan, toast the coconut until it’s apricot-coloured, then tip out likewise. Use a food processor (or the end of rolling pin and a plastic bag) to smash the biscuits into uneven crumbs; a few larger chunks are fine. Roughly grind the nuts in a food processor or mortar, again leaving several large chunks and being careful not to overprocess and turn them into butter.