Peanut Butter Bars

Not sure why I felt the need to stack them.

This weekend we traveled up north to visit some of our friends who live in and around Boston. I believe that a good guest never arrives empty handed. For me, this takes the form of some kind of baking. (For Dave, it means bringing at least a few delicious beers.)

In a fortuitous sequence of events, my friend Kim and I finally got a chance to catch up on the phone last week. She was going to her beach condo for a girls weekend with college friends and was therefore busy cooking up lots of goodies to supplement the many cocktails they would be consuming. She mentioned that she had made recently a no-bake peanut butter bar. Well, that was something that I needed to try myself.

I whipped up a batch the day before we left on our little trip. The whole endeavor took about 20 minutes. These little bars won rave reviews from children and adults alike. And Bob, Dave's buddy from college, paid me the highest compliment by asking me for the recipe while wolfing down his second bar.

Thanks, Kim, for passing this winner along! Here is the recipe with just a few tips.

• In a medium mixing bowl, use a hand mixer to combine 1 1/2 cups graham cracker crumbs, 3 cups confectioners sugar and 1 1/2 cups peanut butter. (I didn't have enough graham cracker crumbs, so I used vanilla wafer crumbs too which were fine.)
• Add 1 cup melted butter and mix. (I thought that this was a little too much butter. 3/4 cup would work fine)
• Press peanut butter mixture into 9x13 pan. Use wax paper to prevent pb covered hands.
• Melt 12 oz (or one bags worth) of milk chocolate chips and spread over pb mixture. 
• Let chocolate set and then cut into squares. Do not make the mistake that I made of putting the pan in the refrigerator uncut. If the chocolate is completely hardened, it will crack. I had to rewarm the pan to cut them into squares. A big pain.