Honey Sweetened No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars

Come summertime, I like having recipes on hand that are easy enough for the boys to make on their own.  (I’ll send one in from the garden to start supper while the other helps me finish up.)  Not having to fire up the oven is also a very good thing.  We took the basic No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars recipe and swapped out the powdered sugar with honey (you can use more or less to taste) and added some oat bran for extra hardiness.  The whole family gives them a thumbs up, and my youngest enjoys beating on the graham crackers to crush them.

Honey Sweetened No-Bake Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars Recipe

Adapted from VeryBestBaking.com

Ingredients

2 cups peanut butter, divided

3/4 cup (1 1/2 sticks) butter, softened

3/4 cup – 1 cup honey (to taste)

3/4 cup oat bran

4 cups (roughly 2 packets) graham crackers, crushed

2 cups mini chocolate chips (I use Enjoy Life)

Directions

Grease/butter a 13×9 inch baking pan.  (I prefer to use glass bakeware.)

Blend 1 1/4 cup peanut butter (reserve 3/4 cup for topping), butter and honey in a large bowl until creamy.  Mix in oat bran.  Mix in graham cracker crumbs and 1/2 cup mini chocolate chips (reserve 1 1/2 cup chips for topping).  Press mixture into baking pan and even out the top with a spatula.

Melt  3/4 cup peanut butter and 1 1/2 cup mini chips in a heavy bottom pot at low heat, stirring until smooth.  Don’t crank the heat up, as scorched chocolate may get hard instead of soft.  (Ask me how I know…)  Spread chocolate/peanut butter mix over graham cracker mix.  Refrigerate two hours or overnight, until firm.  (This is a great make ahead dessert.)  Cut into bars.  Store in refrigerator.  Makes around 60 bars.

You can buy graham cracker crumbs if you like, to put this together even faster.  Otherwise, you can crush the crackers in a food processor or put them in a sturdy plastic bag and have a boy beat on them with a rubber mallet or roll over them with a rolling pin.  You could make this gluten free if you like, by purchasing gluten free graham crackers and gluten free oat bran.  If you don’t have oat bran on hand, you could substitute some flax seed (1/4 cup) and more graham crackers, or some hemp seed, or just more graham crackers. In this batch I used two packets of graham crackers from a box of three.  A little this way or that is not a big deal.

You can use regular size chips if you don’t have mini chips on hand, or even chunks.  With the chunks I’d melt them all with the 3/4 cup peanut butter and spread them on top instead of mixing with the graham crackers, as they would tend to make the bars fall apart.  I did need to open two packages of the Enjoy Life chips, as one package was just shy of two cups of chips.

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