Peanut Butter Bars

I have an great little recipe for you today, and a pregnant-brain confession to make.  First things first: the food.

Now… the confession.  I pop over to a lot of different blogs.  One that I read quite often is Artsy Fartsy Mama.  On Monday, Lindsay posted a fabulous-looking recipe for Peanut Butter Bars.  I thought I should make it, but I promptly got busy doing something else.  I woke up on Tuesday, and I wanted something with peanut butter.  All day long, I kept thinking, I should make something with peanut butter.  Maybe some peanut butter bars?  I couldn’t figure out where the strange craving was coming from, but I dismissed it as one of those weird pregnant things (like bacon and chocolate milk for breakfast). ;)

I broke down and paged through my low-tech recipe book.  The one with all the awesome family recipes in it – you have one of these, right?  The kind that has twice as many recipe cards, and scraps of paper stuffed into it as it was ever meant to hold.  The kind that has my Gram’s treasured cookie recipes jotted down on the back of hardware store receipts   The kind that is busting apart from so much delicious goodness.  This has probably been my favorite gift I ever got, it came filled with my friends’ and family’s go-to recipes.  And as I spent 30 minutes looking through, lo and behold – peanut butter bars.

So I mixed it all up (and I’ll tell you how in the recipe card below) and popped it in the oven, and as I cleaned up… I remembered exactly what started the whole darn craving in the first place.  It occurred to me just then where this subliminal urge was coming from – Lindsay.  I could have skipped all this hunting for a recipe and just used the one she posted earlier in the week.  Duh.

Lindsay’s recipe is a lot different than mine, and it sounds absolutely fabulous as well.  So if reading this now has got you feeling the way I did – that you’ve got to get some peanut butter bars into the oven, stat – feel free to pop over to Artsy Fartsy Mama and compare notes, see which one might better suit your family’s tastes!

I feel like I am losing my mind when I get hungry inspired by another post I read this week, and my poor brain can’t even remember where the darn craving came from.  On the bright side – I feel totally justified in blaming Lindsay when I ate more of these than I should have, since she’s the one who started the craving in the first place!  (And bonus, I ran across one of my aunt’s old recipes that I am excited to make next week, so it turns out it wasn’t a total waste of my time!)

Anyway, without further ado… to the recipe!

5.0 from 3 reviews

Peanut Butter Bars

 

Author:

Happy Hour Projects

Serves: 18

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 20 mins

Total time: 30 mins

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Ingredients

• 1¾ c. flour
• 1 egg
• 1¼ c. brown sugar
• ¾ c. peanut butter
• ½ c. shortening
• ¼ c. milk
• ½ tsp. vanilla
• ½ tsp. salt
• ¾ tsp. baking soda

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 375F and grease a 9x13 baking pan.
2. Cream together all ingredients but the flour and baking soda. Sift the two dry ingredients together, and stir them into your batter.
3. Press dough into your pan (you can use the back of a spoon to help even it out in the pan).
4. Bake for 18-20 minutes, until the top begins to brown. Bars will always look a little under-done when they are ready, if you wait until they look truly "done" they will be crunchy.
5. Cool fully, and cut into bars. Enjoy!

3.2.2708

These were the perfect treat – just what I wanted.  Thanks for hanging in there with my little story time today, and I hope your Thursday is off to a great start!!