The Easter Bunny doesn't bring soy-free chocolate

I promised a chocolate post some time ago.

I didn't get any chocolate eggs for Easter, because the Easter bunny doesn't bring soy-free chocolate. If there was a Passover bunny, he could, because Passover chocolate is soy free--something to do with certain Ashkenazim not eating legumes during Passover. So I ordered mini-chocolate chips, chocolate "buttons" with nonpareils on them, and peppermint patties from Kosher.com. (!!!)

I also got some Hostess-cupcake-like things at our local Giant grocery store. They weren't so hot. Oh, well. The Giant either didn't have the usual complement of chocolate this year, or I was too late.

You can also get soy-free chocolate at Soy Free Sales, Chocolate Emporium, AllergyGrocer.com, and, according to Uncle Phaedrus, at the Soy-Free Chocolate Company, which doesn't seem to have an active website.

My daughter made a chocolate-cherry cake yesterday from an old Betty Crocker cookbook (baking chocolate is soy-free), which refused to come out of the pan, so we ate it with Bird's custard sauce flavored with maraschino cherry juice and called it cottage pudding.

In case you can find soy-free chocolate chips, here's my grandmother's recipe for:

Congo Bars

2/3 cup butter
1 lb light-brown sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 3/4 cup flour
2 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup chocolate bits
1 cup broken walnuts

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit.

2. Melt the butter in a saucepan. Cool to almost room temperature. Stir in the brown sugar, then the eggs, one at a time, and the vanilla.

3. Sift together the dry ingredients, or stir together in a bowl. Add to the butter mixture and mix thoroughly. Fold in the chocolate bits and walnuts.

4. Spread into a 9" x 13" pan. Bake 25-30 minutes (recipe says "32" but that's too much), or until it starts to pull away from the sides of the pan. You can also do the toothpick test, but if you hit a chocolate chip, it throws it off.

5. Refridgerate. When cold, cut into bars.