No Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars
July 11, 2008
It’s a sad thing to admit, but these bars look better than they taste.
The words “no bake” in a recipe have always scared me a bit. It generally seems to mean that you end up with some kind of cold, raw-ish tasting dessert, and what fun is that? But again, the other day it was sweltering in my kitchen and Taste Tester gave me that “are you nuts, woman?!” look when I said I might use the oven. So, I gave “no bake” a try. Did it sway my opinion?
Well, no… not really.
I mean they’re not bad, but they’re quite fattening and sugary and if I’m going to use up all of my dessert points for the day (forgive me, I’ve been hanging out with a lot of people that are currently on the weight watchers diet / points system) I’m going to use them on something that satisfies my craving.
So what’s wrong with them exactly?
- The texture is a bit off. The base of the bar half wants to be icing (from the butter and sugar) and half wants to be a baked good (from the chunky bits of nilla wafer) … yeah, weird.
- The base layer’s flavor is just a bit odd. It’s got a lot of butter and a lot of sugar and doesn’t have enough other flavors to distract you from this. I think adding a bit of salt would have helped a teensy bit, at least to minimize the extreme sweetness.
- I think it might have been better if the base was made with crushed graham crackers instead of vanilla wafers. I love me some vanilla wafers, but they just didn’t do it for me in this one. Grahams, chocolate wafers or maybe even pretzels would have been more flavorful.
On the good side, they were easy to make and hardly expended any energy in the hot kitchen since my food processor did all the wafer crushing for me. Taste Tester said that they were alright and continued to eat them, but he agreed that they weren’t the best chocolate peanut butter snack to come out of my kitchen. Ah well, that’s what I get for going against my gut on this one. No bake… grrr.
I guess I’ll stick with Rice Krispie Treats as a no bake resort the next time I’m feeling the urge to make a dessert without the oven. Feel free to send me any great no bake recipes you know of!
The recipe I used for these No Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars was from Southern Living which was part of a “Seven Ways with Peanut Butter” feature.