Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars | Full Fork Ahead

By ctozzi

Ingredients

• 1/2 pound (2 sticks) unsalted butter, at room temperature
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
• 2 extra-large eggs, at room temperature
• 2 cups (18 ounces) creamy peanut butter (recommended: Skippy)
• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher salt
• 1 1/2 cups (18 ounces) raspberry jam or other jam
• 2/3 cups salted peanuts, coarsely chopped

Details

Servings 24
Preparation time 10mins
Cooking time 55mins
Adapted from fullforkahead.com

Preparation

Step 1

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.

Grease a 9 by 13 by 2-inch cake pan. Line it with parchment paper, then grease and flour the pan.

In the bowl of an electric mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream the butter and sugar on medium speed until light yellow, about 2 minutes. With the mixer on low speed, add the vanilla, eggs, and peanut butter and mix until all ingredients are combined.

In a small bowl, sift together the flour, baking powder, and salt. With the mixer on low speed, slowly add the flour mixture to the peanut butter mixture. Mix just until combined.

Spread 2/3 of the dough into the prepared cake pan and spread over the bottom with a knife or offset spatula. Spread the jam evenly over the dough (you may want to put the jam in a bowl and stir it to loosen it up first). Drop small globs of the remaining dough evenly over the jam. Don’t worry if all the jam isn’t covered; it will spread in the oven. Sprinkle with chopped peanuts and bake for 45 minutes, until golden brown. Cool and cut into squares.

Notes:

As noted above, we didn’t use parchment paper, we just sprayed the pan with Pam spray for baking, which has flour in it. Worked just fine.

It’s a little hard to get the first couple of bars out of the pan just because the pan isn’t lined with foil to help pull them out. I cut a couple of rows into bars then carefully wedged a butter knife in between a couple of them and was able to lift them out enough to grab one. This enable me to then have enough room to scoot my spatula down under others.

This makes a lot of bar cookies. I usually cut these type of cookie into about a 3 inch square, but since they’re pretty rich and I was taking them to work, I cut them into about half that size. How many you get will obviously depend on how big you cut them.

While I thought we’d gotten two thirds of the dough into the pan for the bottom layer it was probably closer to half. We feel like this worked out pretty well, otherwise the top layer of dough may have been too thin. This way it ended up looking a lot like an actual PB&J.

We used a blackberry jam in ours; you can use whatever flavor you prefer.