Peanut Butter Fudge Bars

When I decided that I wanted to create a peanut butter bar, I knew almost immediatly I wanted to steal the fudge fillling from these delicious oatmeal chocolate bars. I stumbled across those bars a few years ago and they are super yummy. Once I knew the filling it was pretty easy to toss together a quick peanut butter cookie crust. The hardest part of these bars for me is making sure I bake them long enough, I am a known undebaker. The other key to the success of these bars is letting them cool long enough, they will be a gooey mess (but still quite tasty) if you don’t let them cool completely. Let’s get down to baking.First thing I do is cream together the butter and the peanut butter, to that I add the sugars and beat everything together for a few minutes on a medium speed.

Then I add my eggs and beat well after each one. Then I dump in the vanilla, baking soda, salt and flour, and beat again until everything is just combined, carful not to over mix now that the flour is in play. I take my batter and add a little over half of it to the bottom of a parchment lined 13×9 inch baking dish. (Actually mine is 13 and a half by 9 and a half which is so odd) I use my cute little offset spatula to spread it evenly.

Now, time to start on the delicious fudgy filling. I melt together my chocolate chips, butter, and sweetened condensed milk over a medium low heat. I always want to bump the heat to high and speed up this process, but its a bad idea, nothing is worse than burnt chocolate.

After about five minutes everything is melted and I pour the mixture over my peanut butter base.

I spread the chocolate out, and then drop spoonfuls ofthe rest of the peanut butter batter on top.

Into the oven it goes, for about forty five minutes.

Let it cool for at least an hour before you try and cut into it. I just pick the whole thing up by the parchment sides and put it right onto a cutting board.

You can see by the top right corner, I was unable to resist a little taste while it was still warm in the pan.