“Oh Baby” Is Right

For the past 2 months I’ve been telling myself I would make peanut butter cups but never got around to it because of how much work it feels like(how lazy is that?); truthfully, I’m fine with dipping a piece of chocolate in a jar of peanut butter and leaving it at that. But after seeing these bars on Michelle’s blog I remembered I had bookmarked Jenna’s Oh Baby Bars. Now these are simple enough I could do.

My only problem was that the recipe seemed to call for no-stir peanut butter and the only one I had enough of was a runny, natural-style peanut butter. I adjusted the ingredients and proportions a tad to account for this and then went from there. All I can say about this is “Oh baby” and that Jenna is a genius for this recipe.

Ingredients I used(Made 10 thick bars):

• 1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons natural peanut butter
• 1 1/4 cups powdered sugar
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 1/4 cup + 1 tablespoon Earth Balance margarine
• 2 Tablespoons coconut oil
• 10oz semi-sweet dark chocolate chips

Instead of blending the ingredients at room temperature, I melted 1/4 cup of Earth Balance and the coconut oil together first. Then I stirred in both of the sugars and lastly the peanut butter.

Once that was homogenous, I spread it out in a large loaf pan and dropped it on the counter a few times to level it out. Of course, I taste tested what was left in the mixing bowl and it was perfect.

Then I melted the chocolate with the remaining tablespoon of margarine in my microwave and spread it out on top of the peanut butter layer.

And then I pretended I was a chocolatier(I’m not going to say this is my dream job, but if it’s what the fates handed me I would not complain and just eat chocolate) and gave it a fancy swirl top.

When that was done, I threw this in the refrigerator to harden and after an hour or so began to cut squares.

In terms of flavor, these are absolutely delicious. Texturally, the bottom layer was a little soft; next time(and there will be a next time) I’d probably reduce the margarine by 2 tablespoons and replace that with coconut oil. Or if I’m being a better planner I’d just buy no-stir peanut butter like the original recipe uses.