Taste Odyssey #6 - Peanut Butter Bars

Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Peanut-Butter-Bars-I/Detail.aspx?prop31=5

There's not a lot to be said for this recipe.  I learned a few important lessons from it, so from a beginner standpoint it was a fantastic recipe, but it's very basic at the same time as it's very, very good.   Conversely, despite being delicious it also gave my wife a migraine and gave me a slightly queasy feeling (which I had conveniently forgotten about from when my mother used to make them years ago), so I'm not planning to make this a recipe that I come back to any time soon.  Nobody else managed this problem, however, and even those of us who fell ill still agreed they tasted great, so if you're feeling that masochistic baking urge then your ship may have come in.

The bottom layer is very simplistic.  My first lesson from this recipe was learning that confectioner's sugar is just icing sugar.  If you're like me, and I know I am, this may have thrown you off at first glance.  From my professional novice perspective I spent quite some time trying to find confectioner's sugar in stores before I resorted to the internet, which of course immediately showed me the way.  Oops.  Next was melting butter, which was a simple matter of a saucepan and medium heat, quite the contrast to certain other melting attempts.  Only the peanut butter looks to pose any real issue but it went pretty quickly into the mixture and the whole thing spread very easily into the pan.

Next stop, the topping, which is just melted chocolate chips.  Of course, after the truffle debacle I was incredibly leery of going back to the melted chocolate well, but there's no point in not challenging myself.  This time around I re-used my stoneware bowl, set the microwave at the higher 70% power level, and let it go for two minutes.  Perfect.  Depressingly so, given my struggles when I was doing the truffles.  Minimal stirring required to just get rid of the last couple hard chips, then an easy pour over the pan.

Dramatic action shot here.  Once the chocolate is nicely spread, resist the urge to carve a dirty word into it before it sets and stuff it into the refrigerator for an hour.  Cut, serve, enjoy, regret, repeat ad nauseum (lots of nauseum in my case).

That's it from this end of the world for the week.  Like I say, this recipe does taste amazing but you should know you may get more than you bargain for from the deal.  Still, it's hard to argue with results that look this good.

Taste Odyssey #3 - Peanut Butter Cup Cookies

Recipe: http://allrecipes.com/recipe/peanut-butter-cup-cookies/detail.aspx

After this particular recipe I am now updating on a weekly basis, as I will be caught up with my current attempts at baking.  I have one left for next week's entry, and then the week after that will hopefully bring something new and exciting into all our lives and more importantly our mouths and to a relatively lesser extent our stomachs, waistlines, and lower intestines.

Right, so I stumbled onto this cookie recipe while I was browsing for ideas that looked good but didn't require a Herculean effort or some sort of baking mojo I have yet to accrue.  I went looking into these solely based on the title, figuring that they would be woefully complicated, however, given the name.  Far from it, these little scamps have pretty much all you could want in a cookie - great dough with a bit of a kick thanks to the peanut butter cups, and once you know a couple of simple tricks they are bog easy to make.

Trick one - make sure you have some decent capacity mini-muffin pans to bake them in.  That sounds ridiculous, but mini-muffin pans come in some pretty small sizes and you'll be baking these things way longer than necessary if you keep having to bake and cool off a single pan due to inadequate size (look, it matters, just accept and move on).  With a single batch yielding 40 cookies, I recommend a couple of 12-muffiners (accepted unit of measurement from the Muffinological Institute of Oslo) so you can get the whole batch done in two bakes.

Trick two - handle the peanut butter cups (I used Reese's) with care and common sense.  Try buy them as close to home as possible and not in the middle of a blisteringly hot summer day like some idiot (nobody I know, I swear).  Once home, stuff them in the fridge for an hour or so before prepping them.  This next bit is not part of the recipe, but something I read from others who had tried it and it should be considered essential to the whole thing given how easy it makes it.  After unwrapping the peanut butter cups from the fridge, toss them in a container of some kind and then throw them in the freezer for a bit (pretty sure I did an hour or so here too).  You may consider this a basic concept on the level of fire = bad, but once the cookies are out of the oven they are very hot and if you try and stuff a room temperature peanut butter cup into the center it'll come apart faster than the American economy tossed into a centrifuge.  Even the frozen ones were quickly warmed and slightly melty on the underside, but the outer peanut butter cups retained the pleasant Madison-Avenue-designed shapes that helped sell the look of the whole thing.

On the food allergen and migraine front, pretty much smooth sailing straight on through with these.  Kraft Peanut Butter in its original form has nothing of any concern.  Shockingly enough, neither did the Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, which I had fully expected to contain some extraneous thickening agent.  Nope, they are just as rich and as bad for you as you had originally thought.  Oh, and these may contain traces of peanuts, so be warned.  Ahem cough.

That's pretty much it.  The cookies look a lot like a similar version I've seen around that has Hershey's Kisses stuffed in the middle, with the difference being that the recipe for the base used here tastes better and a peanut butter cup will kick the ass of a Hershey's Kiss every day of the week.