Peanut Butter Chocolate Crunch Bars (Gluten-Free | Vegan)

We had our one year marriage celebration this past week (yaaaay!), which of course landed on one of our busiest nights. He had a 9:30pm softball game while I had a work event in the morning, which pushed my day back to about 8pm. However, it was our one year - we would make do with a small hour window of time.

I made a quick pasta dinner, which we ended up eating in about 11.6 seconds flights beeecccaaaause...

CAKE! That is a whole one year old, just like our marriage! (However, I would like to think that our marriage has maintained and flourished with its fresh, sweet flavor, while the cake might be heading the opposite direction.)

It was, nonetheless, delicious. Because it's cake, and who cares if it's been in freezing temperatures for a year straight? Not homegirl.

Anyways, the moral of the story here is that when you celebrate your anniversary and your husband leaves you for California at 3:45am the following morning, you do NOT whine and throw a pitiful fit. Oh no. Don't do that. It gets you nowhere.

Instead, embrace the fact that you have 3 days to listen to your songs at top volume while making endless messes in the kitchen, which are your messes only that you get to clean up.

End result? Chocolate peanut butter bars.

  

 

The second I saw this recipe pop up in my Google Reader I knew - those will be mine. And it was as menacing as that reads.

As you can imagine, the marriage of peanut butter and chocolate deserves to be celebrated on an annual basis.

Wait...is there a chocolate and peanut butter anniversary? Have I been skimping on an important holiday my past 26 years? If that was the case, I would need to make up for lost time. 26 days of chocolate peanut butter for all the household! (=2 people. Can I order a new, larger, wardrobe with that?)

I'm sure I don't need to get into it, but I will. These are delicious. I scaled back on the sugar and added in the last handful of un-crunched rice crispies at the end, but other than that I made no changes to this recipe...and you can see the grand product. Just awful. You should probably just make them and bring them over to me to eat for you.

Peanut Butter Chocolate Crunch Bars
from Peas and Thank You

1/2 cup vegan margarine or butter, melted
1/2 cup and later 2 T creamy peanut butter
1.5 cups and later 1/2 cup whole rice crispies
1/2 cup oats
3/4 cup powdered sugar
2/3 cup chocolate chips

1. Crunch up 1/5 cups of the rice crispies nice and good; add to a large mixing bowl with the melted butter, 1/2 cup peanut butter, oats and powdered sugar. Combine fully, and stir in the last 1/2 cup un-crushed rice crispies.

2. Push down into an 8 x 8 or similar-sized dish and flatten on top.

3. In the microwave, melt together the chocolate chips and last 2 T ob peanut butter in 30-second intervals, stirring in between. Pour over the batter, spread evenly, and refrigerate until set. Eat and drool.

Brownie Covered Girl Scout Cookies

Without meaning to, I've developed a theme (read: last 2 posts) of helping you put to work those seasonal treaties that may be sitting around staring you in the face. Not that you should be giving those smiley faces on the Girl Scout boxes the stink eye, but if you're a kind soul and buy some from everyone and have 12 boxes on your countertop, you might want the next creative way to ingest them.

I pretty much find myself making sweet treats only for a special occasions, mainly because I enjoy sharing them with other people and have a reason to go all the heck out. Last night was the perfect time to get elbow-deep in chocolate, since today was a nice overlap of the last day at my current job (!!) and the boy heading off on a church retreat. I knew I wanted to make brownies for my (ex) co-workers and his retreat friends, because I had developed a deeply set urge for those cakey, fudgy choclatey bites, but I had an issue with just making brownies. After some research - behold, the Brookie (a darker, fatty version of my favorite Brookie):

With these 2 excuses, I ended up with 3 TYPES OF BROWNIES COVERED COOKIES. Yeah, and 4 in my piehole, for quality assurance, naturally.

courtesy of IKEA - my favorite cookie concoction 

not a huge fan coconut, yet these were my 2nd fave

classics, but not enough substance for me

These are incredibly easy to whip up, and fun, too. Your fingers get messy and you get powdered sugar eyelashes and you don't even curr that it's Thursday and you miss more than just the commercial breaks of your favorite sitcoms. Which BTW, how terrible is The Office these days compared to its glory days in the early years? It gets a few laughs from me, but not nearly as many as before. Which I guess is alright when you're too busy dipping cookies in brownie batter!

I first got this idea when I saw these stud muffins, coincidentally after I noticed we had an abundance of cookies on the homestead. Allow me to briefly explain my reasons for the ratings:

3. Thin Mints - I know, they're on the top of everyone's list, but they just weren't as substantial as the other two. I'm a food player, so it's important to be able to twist and peel apart layers, or at least get different elements in the brownie cookie. This one simply had a minty flava, which is dang good, but not....wild. Ya know.

2. Samoas - Getting closer to the fun factor. I like the coconut crunchy bits and the fact that they had a hollow center allowed the brownie to cook through the middle - bomb.

1. Singollas - Vanilla sandwich cookies with raspberry jam in the middle?! These things are begging to be covered in brownie. The jam melts, the cream-filled center melts and I melt. There are so many layers to this thing, I could hardly take consecutive bites without wanting to snap another shot of how beautiful they all were.

double time

Glorious. Alright, here's how ya do:

Brownie Stuffed Cookies
inspired by Picky Palate
makes around 30 brookies, depending on size

prepared brownie mix (I used whatever was on sale at Freddie's)
any type of cookie you like (may I please suggest a stuffed something or other?)
powdered sugar (optional, but it's pretty)


It's This Simple:

1. Preheat your oven to 350 degrees; grease a muffin tin.

2. Mix up your brownie mix according to the package directions.

3. Toss some cookies (the only time I'll probably ever advise you to do so) in the brownie mix; coat em all up with batter.

4. Using your freshly cleansed fingers (cause you're wild like that), take them one-by-one out of the batter after ensuring it's thoroughly coated, and place individually in the muffin tin cups.

5. Bake for about 12 minutes, depending on cookie size - mine varied so much because the raspberry Singoalla's were quite heftier than the Thin Mints.

6. When they're done, let the Brookie's cool for a hot minute before running a knife around the edges, so they don't fall apart; place on a cooling rack.

7. When the Brookie's are cooled, sprinkle with powdered sugar.

* As seen in the Singoallas picture above, you can get extraordinarily wild and double 'em up in cups:

It makes for a big ass Brookie, but you can handle at least 1 if I inhaled 3.

Valenutella's Day Molten Explosion (in-your-oven) Cake

Part One: Valenutella's Day

Nutella is a product barely short of an obsession for my loved one. I have found him standing in the kitchen, swirling his finger inside the awkwardly-shaped jar, trying to get as much of the chocolately spread as possible in one swivel. Which is why I felt like a deadbeat girlfriend when not only was I the one to break the news that there even is such a thing as National Nutella Day, but I didn't do a damn thing about it! And it was a Saturday! When all I had to do was plod around in my fleece socks and pretend like I had more important things going on than gorging on chocolate!

Well, I spied this recipe yesterday morning, and decided that since I watched National Nutella Day fly by on February 5th without so much as a lick of the stuff, I was going to get down to business 5 days later. But of course I can't make a decision without analyzing it from 348 different angles, so I thought about Valentine'a Day being a mere 5 days away, and began questioning the timeline for this (not-extravagant-at-all) baking extravaganza.

Ahem, LIGHTBULB: Make the flippin' Nutella cake smack dab in between it's own holiday and Valentine's Day, and we'll be celebrating Valenutella Day. Hard to argue with logical efficiency.



Part 2: Molten Cake

So here I go, 10 hours of cake planning under my belt. I had gone to the gym after work, putting me home at around 8, tired and sweaty. Good conditions for undertaking such a task. But, I had completed my first tempo workout for my half marathon training and logged in about 7 miles for the night, so I was jiving for some butter and sugar.

I'll post the recipe at the end, but this thing was so EASY to put together. You have your dry ingredients, throw in your wets, cover endlessly with sugar and chocolate and then pour on some water.

This cake is definitely a lava-esque type: gooey in the middle, with brownie quality all along the outer edges. I am a failure, and didn't pick up ice cream on the way home from work, but this cake belongs on top of some Haagen Daz. I mean, it has built-in warm chocolate sauce for crying out loud. Amazing the products that come out of a little chemistry/oven teamwork.

Part 3: Explosion-In-Your-Oven

(I want to put a picture here, but my camera won't take a quality one of the inside of my oven. Think: black. Charcoal black.)

I'm here to be real with you guys. Playing around in the kitchen mostly leads to phenomenal dishes (duh), and sometimes leads to messy situations.

First off, I'm an idiot. Second off, this is an easy fix and I really wasn't upset (especially since that cake still held up as bomb.com).

The recipe calls for an 8 inch baking dish. Well, I had everything BUT. So I used a pie dish. Bad idea.

My first clue should have been in the last step, when I poured 1 cup of hot water over the cake - the dish was almost full.

Looking back, why did I continue adding in the last 1/2 cup of hot water? Was it because baking is science and anything that strays from a cake recipe is destined to turn out tasting like chalk? Was it because I was too busy daydreaming of my next 3 meals to think about my next disaster? Was it because I secretly knew I wanted to scrub out my oven on a Friday night?

I don't know, but I do know that about 25 minutes into the baking time the smoke alarm went off, sending me into the kitchen where a cloud of smoke was waiting for me. Opened the oven door, and there is cake molton spewing everywhere - all over the sides of the pie plates, down through both racks, onto the oven floor...pretty explosively awesome.

When this happens, there's only 2 things to do:

1. Remove cake from oven.

2. Eat said cake in bed while you settle down for a nice Thursday night rendezvous with NBC.

Oh, and turn off the oven. Now go eat your cake.


Valenutella's Day Molten Explosion (in-your-oven) Cake
Barely adapted from Alice

*After making this, I realized my substitutions created this vegan, without even meaning to. Make whatever substitutions you want, but I can vouch for this one and say it's almost gone 24 hours later. In a house of 2 people. Excuse me while I go complete my Core Fusion.

3/4 cup flour
1 teaspoon baking powder (2 if your not using Pamela's GF flour)
1/4 teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons cocoa powder, divided
1 cup sugar, divided
1/2 cup soy milk
1/2 cup Nutella
6 tablespoons melted Earth Balance (or butter)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup brown sugar
1-1/2 cup hot water

How To's

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

2. Whisk flour, baking powder, salt, 3 tablespoons of the cocoa powder and 1/2 cup sugar together.

3. Stir in milk, Nutella, butter and vanilla extract. Since we are nearing the end of our Nutella jar when the spread gets a little thicker, I had to mircrowave it with the butter for about 30 seconds, stirring every 10 seconds.

4. Spread the mixture into your 8 inch backing dish. This is important folks. I think you understand.

5. In a separate mixing bowl, stir together 1/2 cup white sugar, 3 tablespoons cocoa powder and brown sugar; sprinkle evenly over the brownie mixture in dish.

6. Pour the hot water over the whole thing (no stirring) and put in oven for 40-45 minutes. Or until your fire detectors go off and you get to eat it a little more soupy than normal. Hallelujah for egg-free recipes!