Monday, July 25, 2011

First Attempt - Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Bars

I want to make this blog not just 'another food blog', I want to make this a real life and true to form blog. We'll talk about food, recipes, mistakes that turn into disasters, mistakes that turn into wonderful new recipes like my veggie stew, about things that deal with gluten free life style that aren't just about food... heck I even have ideas about writing about some stuff that involved our pets!

Another of these ideas was that I would post my 'first attempts' at recipes or ideas. I won't post recipes with it yet but I will share my experience with it. There will be more first attempts posted and when the ones that succeed without needing to be changed or altered, I will include the recipe but for now this one although it did make the cut, there is still something not quite 100% to my liking and I want to experiment with it a bit more. With that said though, it won't be one I explore any time in the near future only because well lets face it, peanut butter + butter + baking = LOTS of calories and fat. So yea, I'll experiment with it again but much later.

This recipe came about because I just LOVE (did I mention LOOOOOOVE) peanut butter and chocolate. A couple of my favourite things when it comes to this are peanut butter cups (yea I have made these too so it'll be posted at some point!) and any thing that even comes close to peanut butter cookies. With this recipe, it takes all the work of waiting for cookies to bake every 10-15mins in god knows how many batches until the batter is gone. It all gets thrown into a cake pan and set to bake. I loved the idea so off I went!

My review so to speak of it is this. It's great that I don't have to wait for batch after batch to become finished because of the fact that they are bars and not cookies. I like the fact that they will all turn out the same look, texture and doneness simply because you won't have to watch each batch to ensure they are all the same. I don't know about you but when I make cookies, it always seem the oven just changes temps a bit too much to keep each batch of cookies cooked evenly... this annoys me especially when you get really under done ones or really over done ones and you didn't change a damn thing between sheets of cookies. The original recipe does call for an entire cup of peanut butter as well as 1 1/2 sticks of butter as you would expect from peanut butter cookies. That is the ONLY thing that puts me off this recipe to be honest. I LOVE cookies but I also don't like the fact that there is always so much damn fat in them unless you are purposely cooking/baking on the 'light' side of things... which hardly include cookies.... at least decent ones.

Now the side I found a bit down is even though followed to the ~T~ the recipe came out a bit dry and very crumbly. This is why I don't want to post it yet. I want to find what will make it a bit more moist and what will make it hold together better. I am pondering a bit more butter as a usual peanut butter cookie recipe calls for 2 sticks of butter and then I'm also pondering an extra egg to help bind it.

All in all though this is a keeper recipe. Crumbling and even a bit dry, me and my dear husband did still manage to finish the pan off in about 2days time (hangs her head in shame). Here is a photo of it just out of the oven. When I attempt it for the final showing, I'll be sure to get more photos as usual.

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