Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars

Oh.  My.  Good.  Gracious.  These things are crazy good.  And they came about all because of one lonely jar of chunky natural peanut butter that had been stashed in the back of my pantry for a while.  He was reaching the end of his shelf life on November 8, 2010.  I bet this jar of peanutty goodness never even dreamed of being used in something so wonderful.  He thought maybe he was destined to be the star player in a few PB & J’s or maybe to be spread on some celery.  I had much bigger plans for him.

In order to use my natural peanut butter I just searched “desserts with natural peanut butter” in Google and after searching through a few cookie recipes I found this recipe on Joy the Baker.  Here is the link to the recipe.  I made minimal changes to the original.  Chunky instead of smooth peanut butter, regular brown sugar instead of dark, and semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate.

These taste like a dressed up Reese’s cup.  The peanut butter layer comes together easily in one pot.  The chocolate frosting is also incredibly simple to make and spreads nicely on the cooled bars.  This is an altogether simple and delicious bar that I will definitely be adding to my go-to recipe collection.  After frosting the bars I chilled them in the fridge which makes the quite easy to cut.  We ate them cold from the fridge and they were delicious, but letting them warm up a bit makes for a wonderful melt-in-your-mouth experience.  Enjoy! (more…)