Today on Sugar Spun Run we'll be making peanut butter bars.
Hey everybody. It's Sam here and today I'm showing you how to make these easy
no bake peanut butter bars. These are great any time of year, but I especially
love making them around Christmas time. They're like a giant thick Reese's Cup. I
think you're gonna love them too. Now the first thing you're going to need for
this recipe is two cups of creamy peanut butter. I do not recommend using natural
peanut butter. You just want to use any regular creamy peanut butter for this recipe.
We're just gonna add this to a large bowl.
And we're also going to be adding ten tablespoons of salted butter. You do want to have this at room temperature
before you add it to your peanut butter. It's just gonna make it easier to combine all of your ingredients.
Now when making peanut butter bars I also
really love adding two tablespoons of light or dark brown sugar, and that's two
firmly packed tablespoons. Now some people have reported that they find the
brown sugar makes the peanut butter bars a little bit gritty. I have never found
that to be the case. Neither has anyone who's tried my peanut butter bars but
maybe if you're using a brand that makes a really gritty brown sugar, that might
do it for your peanut butter bars. I'm not sure. This is optional if you want to leave it out that's completely fine.
We'll also be adding one and a half
teaspoons of pure vanilla extract for flavor. Now you're going to want to use
an electric mixer for this step. You can absolutely use a stand mixer. That would be fine
as well. We're just going to beat all of these ingredients together until they're creamy and well combined.
Now you will need to add three cups of powdered sugar and I like to add this
gradually just a little bit at a time.
Make sure to scrape the bottom of your bowl with a spatula. Just that way you can
make sure there are no pockets of dried powdered sugar lingering on the
bottom. You want everything to be really well combined. This batter does get
pretty stiff and pretty dry so you will just want to make sure you don't have any pockets of sugar hiding.
Once your peanut butter bar dough is looking pretty good, like ours is right here, you're going to want to line a
9 by 9 inch baking pan with aluminum foil. What we'll do is we'll just portion all of this dough into our baking pan.
This batter is pretty stiff and you are going
to want to flatten it so that you have a nice smooth even layer. I have found the
easiest way to do this is actually just take a piece of wax paper. Lay it over
the dough, and then either use my hands or the back of a spoon just to smooth
out the surface until you have that nice even layer.
Now I like to set these peanut butter bars in the fridge while I prepare the chocolate coating. Now for
your chocolate coating you can either use a 4 ounce bar of semi-sweet, or dark
chocolate or you can use about 3/4 cup of chocolate chips. I'm going to be using
chocolate chips today. These are semi-sweet, but dark chocolate chips
would also work really well or if you love milk chocolate that would also be
fine. Because I want this coating to be nice and pretty thin I'm also going to
be adding about a teaspoon of shortening in with the chocolate before I melt it.
It's gonna give me a really smooth easy to spread layer. I'm gonna pop this in
the microwave for about 15 to 25 second increments stirring really well in
between until the chocolate is completely smooth and melted.
Once your chocolate is nicely melted you'll want to grab your peanut butter
bars and we'll just evenly spread the chocolate over the top.
You want to make sure you get all of that chocolate in there. So I'm gonna use the spatula.
Scrape all of it out of that bowl.
Now we'll take these back to the refrigerator, where they're going to need to chill for several hours at least.
I usually recommend chilling them overnight if you can until the peanut butter layer is nice and firm.
These peanut butter bars have had plenty of time to set so we can
go ahead and dig in. Because we lined your pan with foil it'll be really easy
to just lift the bars out of the pan and cut them directly on our counter.
And that is how easy it is to make no-bake peanut butter bars at home. If you guys
love Reese's Cups, or anything chocolate and peanut butter, you are going to
absolutely love these. If you try them out please let me know what you think. I
always love hearing from you. Thank you guys so much for watching and I will see you next time.
You're going to like this one.