reese’s peanut butter bars;

Happy post-labor day weekend!  This past weekend was filled with so much stuff, I’ll be writing about it for weeks!  Here’s a taste: brewery, wine tasting, jazz festival, escape room, hot pot restaurant, renaissance fair, and a ton of board games!  Plus my birthday is coming up this week, so you’d better keep checking back for posts if you wanna hear all the details.  This recipe I made for my sister’s boyfriend R since he just about loooooooves peanut butter.  Also chocolate + peanut butter, but I don’t think he’s discriminatory.  So I always pin all these peanut butter recipes and think I’ll make them when I see him!  But considering he lives in the midwest, that doesn’t actually happen that often.  So when he and my sister and some friends visited for our annual MD Renaissance Festival trip (read about it in my event review), I figured I’d better try out a new recipe!

Peanut butter chips, mini reese’s cups, and reese’s pieces!  All in all, a good day for peanut butter if I do say so myself.  Actually, despite their name, they were not overly peanut buttery.  Honestly, in mine and R’s opinions, probably could have even used a few swirls of actual peanut butter in the bar part.  I just might have to add some next time!  But this bar is soft and chewy, a cross between fudge and cookie consistency, with peanut butter cups sprinkled throughout and topped with chocolatey icing and then reese’s pieces to top it off!  It’s a mouthful.  Of peanut butter deliciousness!

We played soooooo many games this weekend, as per usual with my sister and her friends!  Just for funsies I want to see if I can list them out: Machi Koro, Hanabi, Evolution, Million Dollars But, Salad Bowl, Love Letter, Cosmic Encounter.  Plus my sister got me the Pandemic: In the Lab expansion as an early birthday present, which I played a few times after they all left.  Sadly, despite my high praise of the Pandemic franchise and the clear and concise way they describe the rules of the game, I found In the Lab to be extremely confusing and hard, even when playing on the easiest level.  Still, the best part is that I get to see a lot of the same people in less than a month when we travel up to the Bloomsburg Fair–another food and game escapade you’ll hear about at the end of September.

I will note that I tried to mix in the mini peanut butter cups into the dough as the original recipe by Jocelyn suggested, however I clearly didn’t wait long enough and they basically disintegrated. You’ll see from the photo above that I luckily had reserved some of them thinking that might happen and just pressed them in at the end. So if you can’t let the dough cool quite enough, I suggest that route instead. Plus when you add the frosting over top you can’t see them, so this way will probably get you a more even distribution if you care about things like that.

The chocolate icing is pretty straightforward. And it’s sweet, but it’s definitely got that raw cocoa powder taste as opposed to your milk chocolate-overly-sweet icings that come out of a can. This icing wasn’t hard and definitely was on the soft side, which makes stacking annoying, FYI. Though the Reese’s pieces gives a little bit of a buffer if you need to transfer a lot. Either way, try it out and let me know what you think!

Related posts:

peanut butter pretzel bars; buckeye pretzel bites; cake batter chocolate chip cookies; twix cookies; red velvet cookies;