How Much Peanut Butter is TOO Much Peanut Butter?

When we heard there was a new book about all about peanut butter, we got so excited that two of our bloggers had to test it out. Here’s Emily and snebbu’s dueling thoughts on Peanut Butter Comfort.

Emily: I’ll openly admit it: I’m a peanut butter lover. And I mean loooooooverrrr. Love it in savory recipes, love it in sweet recipes. Spicy Thai-style peanut sauce? Yep, love. I’ll happily take a peanut butter dessert over a chocolate dessert any day. So when does it cross the line? How much is too much?

Peanut Butter Comfort

Averie Sunshine’s new cookbook, Peanut Butter Comfort, helped me dive into this question. Or, to give you the full title, Peanut Butter Comfort: Recipes for Breakfasts, Brownies, Cakes, Cookies, Candies, and Frozen Treats Featuring America’s Favorite Spread. Whew—I’d say that covers a lot of ground. Pretty much anything you could put peanut butter in, Sunshine found a way to do it.

The good stuff: This book is very cute and definitely well-made. Novice cooks will appreciate the accessible and carefully explained recipes and background info. Plus there are plenty of appealing photos! The maybe-good, maybe-not-so-good stuff: all the recipes are pretty simple. Once again, fairly inexperienced people will like this, but I could have used some recipes that were a bit more complex in their flavor profiles or techniques. There is something to be said for familiar, back-to-basics comfort recipes, though.

Snebbu: I wouldn’t go so far as calling it “cute,” but it is very well organized. It is easy to navigate and is categorized in a meaningful way. For instance, you can create your own peanut butters, bake desserts, or even cook savory meals—all categorized in that way. I do agree with Emily in regards to the simplicity of the recipes. BUT, that’s not always a bad thing. I’ve found other cook books to cumbersome, lengthy, and expensive. These are recipes that won’t break the bank either.

Emily: So, the first recipe I made was the Marshmallow Butterscotch Fluffernutter Bars. I love all of those things (just look at all my Peeps posts, anything marshmallow is a-ok in my book) but I have to say this recipe fell a little short of my expectations. I don’t really see how I could have messed up the instructions, so I don’t think it was user error, but I wish the bars had come out a little drier and more balanced. They basically just tasted like tons of melted peanut butter and butterscotch chips that had been re-solidified. So maybe this recipe is truly… too much peanut butter. (Gasp!)

Snebbu: Damnit! I was going to try these out at a company party next week. They look so good. I may have to try these out anyway—I’ll let you know if I get the same results. I really can’t fathom such a thing as too much peanut butter, but the word “re-solidified” does not sound tasty.

Emily: Luckily, the second recipe I tested turned out to be much more exciting: Coconut Carrot Cake and Cream Cheese Cookies. Oh man. Talk about more things I love: carrot cake, coconut, cream cheese?! I knew I had to make these, stat. I prefer moist, chunky cookies with a lot of stuff in them, and these did not disappoint. The finished product came out super tasty, but honestly I would rather just eat this dough by the spoonful. (And there’s not even any raw eggs in it, for those of you who actually worry about that. I’ve been eating raw eggs in cookie dough for 20something years now, and I’m still alive!)

Coconut Carrot Cake and Cream Cheese Cookies

Coconut Carrot Cake and Cream Cheese Cookies

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Single Serving Fruity Pebbles Marshmallow Treat

Fruity Pebbles Marshmallow Treats

Sometimes people tell me I”m creative.

Well, I know for sure my mom tells me that.

I”m not so much creative as I am a problem solver.?  You know what”s a problem in my kitchen??  Leftovers!

Leftovers from this s”mores bar

S

Leftovers from these cookies

Fruity Pebbles Sugar Cookies

So, leftover plus my inability to keep from snacking on marshmallows and handfuls of cereal (I”m a classy lady) equals a super creative situation.

Now, who doesn”t love a good single serve, microwavable dessert (like this chocolate cherry cake or this peanut butter cereal cake)?

If anyone doesn”t love a quick and delicious dessert…I don”t want to know a thing about it.

All the cool kids are doing it.

Single Serving Marshmallow Treat Dessert (featuring Fruity Pebbles!)

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Ultimate White Chocolate Peepmallow Reese’s Peanut Butter Easter Treats

Easter Treats

When I think of Easter foods, I think of marshmallows, pastels, egg-shaped candies, white chocolate bunnies, PEEPS, the usual. Okay, by “foods” I totally meant “sugar-loaded junk foods” but I think we can all get behind that. Hallelujah. If you want to bring a sweet something to an Easter brunch or potluck but don’t want to have to bake or take more than 15 minutes of time, then this is the (adorbs!) recipe for you.

Everyone knows Rice Krispies Treats are delicious, but these are even better because they incorporate melted white chocolate (in the form of a bunny, duh) as well as two types of peanut butter (normal PB melted in with the marshmallows, plus Reeses Pieces Eggs stirred in at the end). Speaking of the marshmallows, I used a combination of regular ones and pink Peeps. He has risen! (In this case, the word “he” means “my blood sugar”).

White Chocolate Peanut Butter Easter Treats

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Top 5 Halloween Pinterest Recipes

Finally, Halloween is here! We’ve spent weeks dreaming about candy, cocktails, and all sorts of festive party snacks, but you know how it goes… the day hits and you realize you’re one recipe short, or you get invited to a last-minute shindig… never fear, we’ve got you covered. ES has been compiling the best, weirdest, and funniest Halloween ideas on our Endless Halloween Pinboard. Here are the top five most repinned discoveries we’ve posted (not counting our own amazing ideas and creations, which you can find collected here!).

5. Halloween Candy Bark
From Annie’s Eats

Butterfingers, Reeses Cups, M&Ms, honey-roasted peanuts, and toffee candy paired with both bittersweet and white chocolate? Sounds like a recipe for a massive amount of cavities… and a massive amount of Halloween happiness. Also good for post-Halloween when you need to use up all that leftover trick-or-treat candy.

4. White Chocolate Bones
From Inspire Co. / Spoonful

Here’s one that’s perfect for all the last-minute lazybones. (Get it? Sorry.) With only three ingredients, these bones manage to be sweet, salty, crunchy, and pretty cool looking.

3. Pretzel Spiderwebs
From Mom Endeavors

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Food Porn Champion: Bacon S’Mores

Yep, our brains just exploded too.

Check out the recipe on the tastespotting blog.

More: S’mores Gone Wild!

100 Ways to Use a Stick of Bacon

Recipes, raves and other bacon bits in Endless Bacon.

Whiskey, Caramel, Marshmallow and Bacon Bark

Yeah, so it’s a mouthful to say, but we’re betting you won’t mind once you find your hand-to-mouth addiction with this week’s bark.

In keeping with the theme of making the bark recipes as easy as possible, we bypassed making homemade marshmallows. Instead we used a bag of store-bought mini marshmallows and melted them ever so slightly on the stovetop, then spiked it with whiskey and poured that whiskey marshmallow layer over the chocolate.

If you’re wondering why not spike the caramel filling as well — good point — and we tried that. But it takes a lot of whiskey to edge out the strong flavor of caramel.  In doing so, the caramel filling became too liquidity for a bark. So while that was a no-go for the bark, we’ll be bringing that whiskey-spiked caramel back for an upcoming recipe.

And since it seems we are never satisfied, we decided to go one step further and finish our whiskeycara-mallow with a spiced bacon crumble. Yes, spiced — that’s spiced with cayenne and black pepper.

There you have it—an ES style bark that’s equally sweet and spicy and a whole lot punchy, with all kinds of goodness.

On a tangential note, we used this Beka Bain Marie to keep the chocolate melted, warm and ready to go. Mighty handy for this series – thank you, Beka!

Whiskey, Caramel, Marshmallow and Bacon Bark

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Plate It or Hate It

Recent food world discoveries the ES crew is loving and hating…

Plate It: Stacker Mallows

We’re usually not partial to Rachel Ray-esque products that dumb down food to the lowest common denominator, but anything that gets s’mores in our mouths quicker is fine by us.

Hate It: Paula Deen’s Butter-Flavored Lip Balm

If you felt the need for a taste in your mouth to remind you all day long that you are an insatiable glutton. (Photo: Holly Bailey, via Grub Street)

Plate It: Ramen to the Rescue

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