First of the No-Bake Summer Dessert Recipes
In this previous blog post, I located 5 No-Bake Summer Dessert Recipes I wanted to try out in the next couple of months. I gave my husband the choice of what he wanted me to try first and he asked for the Peanut Butter Bars. Pretty good choice in my opinion.
This recipe for Peanut Butter Bars is from www.amandascookin.com and you can find the recipe here.
I decided to go with the graham cracker option after I could not find vanilla wafers at my local grocery store. I’m sure they were there somewhere and I just didn’t see them but I was losing interest in my search and found myself staring longingly at boxed cookies. It was time to move on before I made a purchase I would later regret.
The recipe calls for 2 cups of graham crackers. I looked through the pictures on her blog post and saw that the picture of the ingredients had the crackers crushed. I’ll be honest, I didn’t completely crush my graham crackers because I figured they were going in the food processor anyway. So a full sleeve and half a sleeve of graham crackers roughly broken apart was 2 cups.
In hindsight, I probably should have put the crackers through the food processor first and measured out my 2 cups but I’ll get to why later.
Some days I like recipes that don’t need a lot of bowls and stuff that I have to clean up after. This is one of those recipes. Everything goes into the food processor. The recipe does give you options if you don’t have a food processor which I thought is very helpful. A word about the food processor; you will notice in the above picture that the ingredients are plenty. Don’t attempt this with the small 4-cup food processor.
I did melt my butter on the stovetop but it didn’t take long and it didn’t heat up the kitchen. If you want, you can use your microwave.
Why I should have crushed my graham crackers
Once everything is mixed, the instructions tell you to spread the peanut butter mixture into a 9 x 13 baking dish. Well, my mixture was too soupy to spread. I added more graham crackers and pulsed again. That helped although I would still not say I was able to spread the mixture. It just levelled out on its own.
Since it was rather thin, I decided to chill it before trying to cover it in chocolate. I tasted the peanut butter mixture and it was good. I just hoped it would firm up after some time in the refrigator.
After about 2 hours, I decided I couldn’t wait any longer and got on with the chocolate top. Again, I used my stove top since I have a love/hate (mostly hate) relationship with the microwave. It really didn’t take long to melt the chocolate and peanut butter on the stove top.
And guess what!!! The peanut butter layer was firm enough to spread the chocolate on!! YAY!! If it hadn’t been, I would have still poured it on and everyone would have received a bowl of liquid peanut butter and chocolate :-).
Back into the fridge for another hour and this is what happened….
The Results
Delicious! The 9 x 13 pan of treats did not last long. The peanut butter part did firm up and the chocolate/peanut butter top was great. My son wanted a milk chocolate top but honestly, the semi-sweet chocolate is perfect. I think milk chocolate would make this too sweet for me. The recipe does mention that you can use milk chocolate if you wanted it more like a Reese’s Peanut Butter cup.
I didn’t have any issues with the chocolate top cracking when I was cutting bars. I had issues with the chocolate top not sticking to the peanut butter but I didn’t care. It didn’t break apart so I was able to just place it back on top of the car anyway.
About the recipe and how it was written
I appreciated all the pictures that were included in the original recipe. I thought the instructions were well done in conjunction with the blog post. I liked the simple ingredients and the ease of clean-up. I’m certainly going to try other recipes from her site.
These Peanut Butter Bars will certainly be made again!
Looking for more peanut butter recipes? Check out my post on the best Peanut Butter Cookies.