Peanut Butter Bars

I've decided to try and start broadening the subjects of my blog.  Cards are fabulous and a major part of why I started this blog, but I want to start sharing other things with you as well.  It may take awhile, and there will probably still be more posts about cards than anything else, but I hope you will stick with me and enjoy the new topics :)

I've been craving sweets lately, but we have tried really hard to cut down on having those in the house.  Which is nice, but it's almost like the less we have of something, the more I want it...

I found a random box of white cake mix in our cupboards and decided I wanted to make something with it...but wasn't sure what.  Cupcakes ran through my mind, but I wasn't feeling really in the cake mood.  I've made cookies before with a box cake mix, but I make cookies often enough that those didn't sound good either.

I decided to start surfing the web to see what other people do with their box cake mixes to jazz them up a little.  I found this fabulous thread Here that has so many good ideas and tons of them stood out to me...unfortunately I didn't have ingredients for a lot of them.  So I kept searching.  I came across the peanut butter bars comment and fell in love!
I've been addicted to peanut butter lately.  We make these peanut butter/oat protein balls that we've been eating after our workouts that are so yummy (I'll share that recipe sometime in the future), and we've fallen in love with making peanut butter/chocolate/banana smoothies on the weekends.  So peanut butter was definitely a good choice to add to this box mix.

A few changes that I've made to the recipe:
It was suggested to use yellow, but I used white since that was all I had on hand.
Instead of the suggested water, I used milk.  Not sure what sort of difference this made with the bars since this wasn't for a cake, but I read that milk will make cakes denser and that was sort of my goal in making these.  So I used milk :)
I'm sure you could use crunchy peanut butter or almond butter in this recipe.  I only had creamy :)
And of course, I added about 1/4 cup of chocolate chips to the batter.  Desserts have to have chocolate!
Here is the recipe:
1 box of white or yellow cake mix
1 cup of peanut butter
1/3-2/3 cup milk or water
1 egg

Preheat oven to 350.  Mix together the cake mix, peanut butter, milk and egg.  Pour batter into a lightly greased 9x13 pan.  Bake for 20 minutes or until toothpick comes out clean.

These turned out fabulous!  Mine were slightly underdone and I didn't use a 9x13 pan...mine was 9x9 which made them pretty thick, but still delicious!

You can whip up a batch of frosting to put on these too if you want.  I didn't add any as they were pretty sweet already.  Definitely try this recipe out!  You will not be disappointed!
If you do, let me know what you think!  Or if you made any modifications to it!

Enjoy your treat!
<3 Emily

1 comment:

  1. Mmmm, YUM! sounds Fabulous Miss Emily! I am going to pin this so I can try it down the road.. right now I am attempting to say away from sweets lol but I know that will be short lived, lol 8-)

    Hugs
    Shannon

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