Peanut butter and chocolate - a match made in traybake heaven

I subscribe to quite a few email lists from bakers - whether it be blog posts or email newsletters.  I love reading and saving or printing out the recipes and ideas for future inpsiration.  One such recipe was this from Betty Crocker, that great American powerhouse of ideas, for Chewy Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars.  I mean, that just sounds good right there, doesn't it?!!

And with a starting out photo that looks this good, you know it's gonna taste amazing!  Mmmm...

It was a pretty easy recipe to convert to metric measurements (I really don't like American cup measurements, they're too imprecise for my scientific mind to handle) and to get to this stage.  They asked you to sprinkle chocolate chips over the just-out-of-the-oven traybake.  You can see in the photo that a few have started to melt within moments of touching the warm peanut butter choc studded base...

Then a few moments later you had to use a palette knife or similar to smooth out the melted chocolate and quickly add the chopped peanuts, so they'd stick well.

I left it out on the kitchen counter to cool, and realised after a little while that it would never set hard at room temperature.  So I cut it into 'bars', which in my case were more like bite-sized squares, then popped it in the fridge for a while.

And got this as the end result.  Oh my, peanut butter heaven!!  This tasted so good, and was so quick and easy to make.  And only about 1000kcal per bite-size of luscious dessert.  You have to try this - let me know how you get on!  Enjoy.

My blog made an order!

There's a new family that have moved into our area, and one of the children has joined Mini-1's class.  They get along well, and we've walked home from school together a few times.  I was chatting with the Mum one day to arrange a playdate after school for the girls, and gave her one of my business cards so she had my contact details. 

I was very pleasantly surprised to learn that she'd spent the following morning reading my blog!  She says she really enjoyed it, and was very keen to taste the Sweet and Salty traybake.  A great choice, as it's very more-ish.  I had a busy week and weekend coming up, so she decided to have it for today, as it was her 19th wedding anniversary.

The cut one is an extra tray I made for us.  I mean, this stuff is so good that it's hard to give away.  (although I was good, and cut it into about 60 little bite-size pieces and thus shared them with the girls' school teacher, who loved them too!!)

Hershey's Kisses don't melt well, fact.

I've recently gone through my baking store cupboard, to check if any items are nearing their use-by date.  And found some Hershey's Kisses and Crunchie (honeycomb choc) bars. 

There are odd other items, but I wanted to use these up first.  I had thought perhaps to do cookies, or pop them into a tray of brownies or cupcakes, but couldn't face eating any of those things.  Then I remembered a traybake I'd done in the past that used Crunchie's and was divine.  So I removed all the wrappers and got the chocolate ready to melt.

And the long and the short of it is, these Kisses don't really melt very well.  But I didn't learn that until a little too late.  If you look closely at the next image, you may see a little evidence on the top layer of the slice, where it seems to have separated slightly.  Nevermind, these were for us and it didn't affect the taste at all, agreed by the external taste-testers (non Team Becca).  Yummy!