A while back I tried making some Banana Dark Chocolate Stuffed French Toast. It was a pretty good first attempt, but it tasted a little more like a panini as opposed to french toast probably because I didn’t let the bread soak for long enough. The flavor was right but overall it was too crunchy and not soft enough in the middle. I asked Neamet Elsayed, owner of The Little Grocery in Hoboken what kind of crazy magic he uses on his french toast to make it taste so incredible.

Finally I got the chance to apply what he told me. Conclusion: he’s a genius. It came out fantastic.

Recipe after the break.

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It seems really unfair to review the chocolates I got at See’s Candies after reviewing what appears to be the crowned glory of peanut butter filled chocolate, the Vosges Peanut Butter Bonbon, but such is life.

These were a gift from my taste tester who visited one of See’s locations in Phoenix, Arizona. See’s markets itself like a mom and pop shop and that is the way it started, but now they have a whole bunch of stores across eleven states and even in Hong Kong, Japan and Mexico. It started in the west, which is where most of their stores are currently and explains why I am not familiar with them having lived in New Jersey most of my life. Yes, JERSEY!

My See’s chocolate box included a mix of Peanut Butter Patties and P-Nut Crunch. Both of which were good, and hey after indulging in the Vosges Bon Bons, I swore of Reeses Peanut Butter Cups, not other varieties. Loophole discovered! Woo!

The inside of the box smelled exactly like the inside of a box of Girl Scout Tagalongs. The Peanut Butter Patties are basically Tagalongs without the cookie part. Which is tasty, and certainly better than the peanut butter filled chocolates you can get at the grocery store, though if I had to pick I’d stick with the Tagalong.

The P-Nut Crunch resembled a mass-produced product that you may have heard of. It’s known as the Butterfinger. The P-Nut Crunch is essentially the same thing with a crumbly, less crunchy texture that doesn’t stick to your teeth. Considering the teeth clinging quality of Butterfingers is the complaint I hear most about them, it seems that P-Nut crunch has the advantage.

Both chocolates are coated in a milk chocolate. There’s something about chocolate from a mom-and-pop-ish place such as this over the mass-market ones that makes such a difference to me. It’s tasting chocolates like these that remind me that milk chocolate can be good, as I tend to go for dark chocolate first. It’s creamier and not so sugary tasting. A definite plus.

See’s packaging also has that homemade feel while products such as the Butterfinger have that unattractive brightly colored wrapping. As I’ve mentioned before, I have a weakness for good packaging. Based on this and the look of the product that lies within, I would pick See’s over the Butterfinger or Reese’s PB Cup any day. The chocolates look like they might have come out of someone’s kitchen being slightly wonky as opposed to having come off a conveyor belt. It’s little touches like this that make choosing your snack an easier decision, subconsciously.

Now if only they’d set up shop in New Jersey. Yes, JERSEY!

Buy yourself some See’s Candies and see the difference for yourself. I’d like to give you a direct link to the Peanut Butter Patties, but I can’t seem to find it on their site. I’m honestly not even sure if that’s their real name since the person that bought them for me didn’t take thorough notes on his purchase. What was he thinking? If you’re looking for the P-Nut Crunch, you can find them here.

Okay, so I’ve been craving cupcakes a bit lately. So sue me!

Here’s the second cupcake recipe in a row that I’m posting, but I can’t help it. I love em. And I was going over to my mom’s for a big Sunday dinner, so of course I had to bring something sweet along! Because it makes perfect sense to chase a nice carb filled pasta dinner with a nice carb and sugar laden cupcake!

I actually cheated (shhh!) and used Betty Crocker’s Super Moist Yellow Cake Mix for the cupcakes. I love this mix because not only is it completely moist and delicious, but it’s quick and lets me save my energy to put towards decorating the cupcakes all nice and pretty.

In addition to using Peanut Butter M&Ms, I also used these adorable sugar roses that I bought at NY’s Cake Supplies a little while back.

Every now and again I like to use up things that are in my pantry so that nothing gets too old and my tiny kitchen doesn’t get cluttered. I had bought these roses and put them aside for a “special occasion”. They’ve waited, and waited and waited their turn until finally, today was the day!

Recipes are after the break. These are my stand-by buttercream recipes. They have been used many, many times in my kitchen and I highly recommend them!

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Did you ever think you’d be able to find any Paula Deen recipe that only had HALF of ONE stick of butter? Well, here’s a shocker, I found a DESSERT of hers that only has that little in it. Kinda crazy. Kinda freaks me out actually, but these sound great none the less and a five star rating on food network speaks well for em.

This recipe is for mini cheesecake cupcakes that have a bite sized peanut butter cup in the inside waiting for you to bite in. These already have both chocolate and peanut butter, but I think they’d be even more fun if you substituted chocolate wafer cookies instead of regular graham crackers for the crust. Because you can never have enough chocolate right? I also personally love cheesecake cupcakes that have a dollop of frosting on top, so you could top em off with vanilla, chocolate or peanut butter frosting to make em extra yummy!

Not to mention with the butter for the extra icing on top, they’d really be Paula Deen-ified!

Check out the recipe for Peanut Butter Cheese Cake Minis at Food Network.

WARNING: You may want to eat the contents of these photos but do not. Please exercise will power when using these products. When purchasing, also buy yourself a cookie should cravings be persistent.

Don’t you hate it when you see a snack, be it chocolate and peanut butter or some other type that claims it has zero calories, but it’s really some kind of mean misleading trick? Well, these really do pack a chocolate and/or peanut butter flavor with none of the calories to take away the fun! Yay! Introducing, a few lovely varieties of chocolate and peanut butter lip glosses!

The above photo features Scharffen Berger’s Ganache for Lips including (from left to right) Vanilla Mousse, Mocha Latte and Mint Chocolate.

You can definitely buy a cheaper lip balm or chap stick at the drug store, but why would you want that other waxy stuff when you can taste sweet chocolate on your lips? I have been a fan of this line of chap sticks for years now. They don’t sell em at every pharmacy out there, but I picked these up at Whole Foods so they should be easy enough for you to find. Up until now I had only tried the Mint Chocolate, which is fantastic, but this time around it’s all about the Mocha Latte. Sooo chocolatey!

It seems kind of wrong that this is the first time that I’ve mentioned Scharffen Berger. I was pretty obsessed with their chocolate for a while there, so much so that I made sure to visit their factory while on a trip to San Francisco a couple of years ago. They unfortunatly don’t have a Chocolate Peanut Butter flavored lip ganache (yet… hint, hint) but we can picket outside their factory until they do! Who’s with me?!

No one? Fine. Moving on…

There’s also this lovely Chocolate Truffle Lip Gloss by Cheeky Chimp that my mom had picked up for me. It looks like a Ferrero Rocher and adds a little glittery sparkle to your lips. It comes in Milk Chocolate, Chocolate Orange and Chocolate Cherry. I’ve personally never been a fan of the stick-your-finger-in-em lip glosses (I actually just put some of this one on my lips to help me write about it and got a nice smudge of it on my laptop’s L key. Sorry, L!) but the fun packaging almost makes up for it.

Now, those are all well and good, but you want some chocolate AND peanut butter, now don’t you? Well, first up we have Hershey’s Reeses MEGA BALM.

On my recent trip to various NYC Candy Stores, I came across Reeses Chapstick and Lip Gloss at the Hershey Times Square Store. They sold it separately and in this fun variety pack. Personally, I love variety packs because you can either keep them for yourself and taste something new every day or share em with your buddies. Of course if you buy it on it’s own, the Reeses Lip Balm comes in many different shapes and sizes and can even be hung from your keyring.

However, if you’re a Ben and Jerry’s fan you might prefer their adorable mini ice cream container lip balms. They come in Chocolate Fudge Brownie, Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough and of course, Peanut Butter Cup. The only down side to this is that they’re somewhat hard to find. Most sites link to the UK Ben and Jerry’s site, but it seems the page has been removed. Luckily they have em on Ebay.

Out of the products I’ve tried, the Scharffen Berger is the clear winner over the Cheeky Chimp for both taste and convenience. I have yet to try Hershey’s product but being that it is the only chocolate AND peanut butter one (that is readily available) out of the group, it’s got a leg up on the competition!

These lip glosses will win your heart with their delicious smells and flavors. Not to mention if you kiss your special someone, you won’t have to worry that you’re torturing them with awful tasting lip stick!

*Note: I just had to mention this even though it’s not chocolate and peanut butter… on my web search for some of the above mentioned cosmetics, I came across this: CHEETOS LIP BALM! Ewww! Cheetos gross me out, so I might have a biased opinion but I just find that incredibly repulsive! Appropriately, I found it on a site called Strange New Products. The same company, Lotta Luv also makes a Twinkie flavor that I can’t make up my mind on and a Cinnabon flavor that actually sounds really good.

What you are looking at is a tray of exploded mutant Chocolate Peanut Butter Croissants. All I did was follow Nigella Lawson’s easy recipe for Chocolate Croissants. The only difference was that I had spread 1/2 tsp or so of peanut butter on the puff pastry before adding the chocolate and rolling them up. And what did I get? Night of the Living Dead Chocolate Peanut Butter Croissant Zombies. Eek!

Like anyone, I get disappointed when I try a recipe and it doesn’t turn out. But what really grinds my gears (that was for you Family Guy fans) is when I try an ABSOLUTELY SIMPLE recipe and it doesn’t turn out. Because that just makes me feel like a dummy. And her little pep talk that proceeds this recipe which proclaims how easy it is doesn’t make me feel any better!

I watched Nigella make these on tv and followed the instructions and have no idea what happened but these look nothing like hers and certainly not how I’d like them to look. I wrapped the puff pastry around chocolate, painted them with an egg glaze and somehow when I took them out, the puff pastry puffed up, pushing the chocolate out on top of the croissants. They looked like a cakey chocolate mess and like they bled peanut butter. Boo!

I also used a bittersweet chocolate and think it made too dry of a combination with the peanut butter. I should have stuck with my gut and used milk or semi-sweet. So not only did they not look pretty, they didn’t taste great either.

Maybe instead of the triangular shape, I will try the rectangular variety and really make sure to roll the pastry over a few times to avoid another explosion? My chocolate was peaking out a little bit before they baked but I just figured it would show through as it often does with chocolate croissants, not explode out of them completely.

Any suggestions? Please help!

I know that I‘ve mentioned before how much I love salt, but incase you missed it, here it is again:

I LOVE salt.

The combination of sweet and salty never gets old for me. Lesser Evil sells many delicious kettle corn flavors, but the one that caught my eye was, of course, their Peanut Butter Choco flavor. They say “kernels with a dark cocoa coating intermingling with creamy natural peanut butter coated popcorn is a beautiful thing.” Anyone out there care to disagree? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

I’m such a sucker for packaging. I like their product without even tasting it. And apparently I’m not the only one. NOTCOT also took note of their fun pattern and festive packaging noting, “best of all is really this pattern of graphics they designed which is on the foil/plastic wrap in the box, as well as a desktop wallpaper available on the site.”

Grab yourself a beautiful box of Lesser Evil’s Kettle Corn (to taste, if not just to look at) at your local Whole Foods or place an order on their website. It looks like the smallest amount you can buy on their site is a 4-pack, but one box wouldn’t really enough anyway, now would it?

Hello People!

Sorry I missed a day there. I don’t have a real excuse. May has just been a crazy busy month thus far and I was feeling lazy. I am human after all. A chocolate peanut butter obsessed freak one, but still human. :P

I made up for my super lazy day yesterday by starting today off with a bang, though! I woke up at 7 am and baked cookies before even eating breakfast. So take THAT! And the fact that I made these so early in the day and they were quick enough to assemble before low-blood-sugar crankiness set in, that’s gotta speak for how quick and easy they are to make. Especially for sandwich cookies, which can be quite tedious sometimes.

This recipe is from Everyday Food’s June Issue. You may remember me plugging Everyday Food recently. What can I say? It’s super! AND they shared a chocolate peanut butter recipe two issues in a row! They won some brownie points with that.

My taste-tester thought these were a tad dry. I didn’t think so at first but agreed after further “research”. These are still totally worth making though. Especially because the flavor is DELICIOUS! Seriously, these have that perfect balance of chocolate-peanut-butter-sweet-saltiness going on. Which is why even though my taste-tester wasn’t totally satisfied with the texture, he still managed to eat a few of them.

Recipe (with minor modifications) after the break!

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This is a snack idea that was inspired by a vegan snack submission from CPBG reader, Erin Foster. She spreads peanut butter on a Wasa Rye Cracker and tops it with chocolate chips. Fast and tasty.

However, I didn’t stick to her version exactly. I used Wasa Oats Crackers since rye is a flavor I don’t particularly care for and used cocoa nibs… for no good reason, really. But for me, “because they’re delicious” is enough of a reason. I also suspected the nuttiness of the nibs would go well with this fruit. And they did!

Not just any fruit either! A Pluot! Er… Plumicot! Or is it an Aprium? Conclusion: this fruit hybrid has too many names.

Whatever this was called, I think it’s my new favorite fruit. It looks a little closer to an apricot, but tasted just a bit more like a plum. My tastebuds were a bit confused but extremely delighted at the same time. I will have to track these down again. I love when the weather gets warmer and fruits are in season again, don’t you? These were as sweet as candy and disappeared from my fridge in record time.

As for the other ingredients, I am still obsessed with PB & Co’s The Bees Knees Honey Peanut Butter. And though I had no idea what to expect from the Wasa crackers, they were surprisingly tasty. They are light, crunchy with a great nutty oat flavor, and provided the perfect bed for peanut butter. My only qualm with them was that they were a bit fragile, and with every bite I hoped that the disturbance wouldn’t make the rest of the cracker that remained in my hand crumble, decorating my shirt with a fruity-peanut-butter-cocoa-nib mess. Easy solution though: eat over a plate. I know, you wish you were this smart.

Back to the cocoa nibs. I suppose now’s a good time to admit that I’ve polished off a lethal amount of Askinosie Nibby Bars in the last few weeks. Thinking about it makes me feel gluttonous. And now I have a bag of their lovely Roasted Cocao Nibs. Let the gluttony continue! Bwahaha! For those of you who may not have ever had the pleasure of tasting cocoa nibs, here is a definition for you from Gourmet Sleuth:

Cacao Nibs are perfectly roasted cocoa beans separated from their husks and broken into small bits. They are the essence of chocolate. Nibs add crunchiness and subtle chocolate flavor to baked goods and savory dishes. They make a great substitute for roasted nuts or chocolate chips, without added sweetness.

They basically taste like chocolate nuts. The top of Askinosie’s Cocoa Nib box suggests that, “they taste great with yogurt, peanut butter, toast, smoothies, brownies, cookies and ice cream.” I’ve even been known to put these in my salad. Yes, salad. I was not kidding when I professed my love of them. Hmm… maybe I could try a salad with the cocoa nibs, that apricotplumthingy, some goat cheese, dried cranberries… hm!

Erin said that this was her favorite vegan snack before being diagnosed with a nut allergy. My taste tester also developed a nut allergy in recent years so I have seen second hand how unfortunate it is to deal with. He can eat every nut but peanuts (they are a legume). While I don’t suffer from this I often think about what experiencing it would do to my diet. Obviously, given the title of this blog I might be just a little upset. Since my focus is peanut butter, I can’t post recipes that are void of nuts but I do try to keep an eye out for vegan and gluten-free recipes here and there. If anyone out there has a special diet chocolate peanut butter recipe they’d like to share, please do.

By the way, a small note for you vegans: I just read here that all Wasa Crackers are vegan except the oat flavor. So keep that in mind if you decide to purchase them!

In the meantime, enjoy this tasty refreshing treat!

Both of our versions after the break.

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Well, I’m sorry that I didn’t discover this until the day of, but just incase you’re a bad person a bit late on getting your mom a gift for Mother’s Day, put in an order for these asap. Peanut Butter & Co is offering two Mother’s Day Gift Boxes for you to choose from. In my opinion, as the stereotype says, all women love chocolate. So I suggest the brownies, but really they both look super tasty.

I have loved everything I’ve tried from Peanut Butter & Co, so given their great track record, I’m bettin this gift idea is a winner!

I may be too late to order a gift and have it shipped on time, but it’s not too late to send my regards. Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms out there, and especially to mine. :)