No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars

These bars bring back memories of when my hubby and I lived in Seoul, South Korea. We moved to Seoul 3 weeks after getting married and spent the first year of our marriage teaching English there. We lived in a tiny 300 square foot apartment where the bathroom was the size of a telephone booth and the sink doubled as our shower. Who doesn’t love showering next to their toilet, right? Then there was our kitchen, it comprised of a small fridge, sink, and 2 gas burners. The bathroom took some getting used to, but kind of grew on me after a while. But the kitchen…I loathed that kitchen. Cooking and baking are ways I like to exercise my artistic abilities and in Seoul I seriously struggled on this front! The less than adequate kitchen combined with foreign and unidentified ingredients at the market made for a culinary challenge. Thank goodness for Costco though! We went there monthly and stocked up on as many comforts from home as we could carry on the subway. What a spectacle we must have made: a tall (by Asian standards) blonde, and her really tall (6 foot, 3 inch) bi-racial husband schlepping bulk American products like butter, peanut butter, blocks of cheese, cereal, chocolate chips, etc onto a crowded Seoul subway…awesome.


Our Telephone Booth-sized Bathroom




Kitchen



The rest of our immense 300 sq. ft. apartment.

 With my limited American products and a barely functioning kitchen, I needed to come up with a dish to bring to potlucks at church. And so an old recipe my roommates and I used to make in college was reborn. These bars were always a hit and taste sooooo good! What’s not to love about peanut butter and chocolate?

No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars

Ingredients:

2 C peanut butter, divided

¾ C butter, softened

2 C powdered sugar, divided

3 C graham cracker crumbs

1 ½ C semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions:

Grease a 13 x 9-inch baking pan.

Beat 1 ¼ cups peanut butter and butter in large mixer bowl until creamy. Gradually beat in 1 cup powdered sugar. With hands or wooden spoon, work in remaining powdered sugar and graham cracker crumbs. Press evenly into prepared pan. Smooth top with spatula.

Melt remaining peanut butter and remaining morsels in medium, heavy-duty saucepan over lowest possible heat, stirring constantly, until smooth. Spread over graham cracker crust in pan. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours or until chocolate is firm; cut into bars. Store in refrigerator.

Source: Adapted from Nestle Classic Recipes