These bars start out with a crispy and buttery shortbread base which is topped with a creamy cheesecake, tart granny smith and a rolled oat crumble before being finished off with a drizzle of salted caramel sauce!

These caramel apple cheesecake bars made their way around the food blogging sphere not to long ago and they certainly caught my attention! Even just by reading the title, they sound amazing but that is just the start! If you dig a little deeper you will see that they start with a base of butter shortbread which is topped with the cheesecake followed by the apples and then a layer of rolled oat crumbs only finally be topped with the caramel sauce. These bars are like combining shortbread , cheesecake , apple crisp and caramel sauce all into one truly spectacular treat!

Given all of the components, these bars require a bit of effort to make but overall everything is pretty straight forward and it so worth it! You do have to pull the cream cheese and butter out of the fridge ahead of time to come to room temperature so keep that in mind when making these bars.

This recipe calls for lining the baking dish with aluminum foil which I had never done before and it turned out great! After chilling the bars in the fridge over night I gently pulled on each end of the aluminum foil and the whole sheet of came right up and out, nice and cleanly! No more destroying half of the bars trying to dig them out of the pan! I will definitely have to remember this trick!

When I got up this morning my patience had run its course and I could not resist pulling the caramel apple cheesecake bars out after a night of chilling. (I hope it’s not wrong to have cheesecake bars for breakfast!) My expectations for these bars were certainly high and they exceeded them beyond my wildest dreams! This is just one of those things where the combination is far superior to the sum of the parts! All of the flavours and textures work so well together with the tart apples balancing out the sweetness of the other components. The crispy short bread crust contrasted the soft cheesecake and tender apples and the crumb topping added another dimension of texture. The caramel sauce was of course the star of the show and the coarse sea salt in it was particularly nice. These are going to disappear quickly!