Gluten-Free Chocolate Peanut Butter Bars

I have a salacious sweet tooth. And today all I wanted was some peanut butter bars. The only problem - we only have gluten-free baking ingredients in our house. And I could not for the life of me find any gluten-free recipes for peanut butter bars that didn't consist of fucking granola or flax seed. Just because you're gluten-free doesn't mean you want to consume 200% of your daily fiber all the time. 

So I made something up. And it was delicious.

I found walnuts and pretzels in the pantry, along with an all-purpose baking mix. All peanut butter and YOU'VE GOT CRUST.

I crushed all that stuff up in my Vitamix and added some butter to make it moist, almost like a cheesecake crust. That's what it reminded me of. Oh shit now I wanna make gluten-free cheesecake.

Then I added a load of peanut butter and some powdered sugar and mixed that bad boy up with my hand mixer.

In the words of George Takei, Oh myyyyy.

I tasted it, and I just wanted to eat it with a spoon. The pretzels added a perfect crunch and saltiness to balance out the sweetness.

Butter your pan and add a bit of the baking mix as your "flour" so the bars don't stick to that thing like glitter on...well anything. Glitter doesn't go away. And in this case, you don't want the peanut butter cookie bar to stick to that pan.

Turn your over to 375 and bake for 15 minutes without the chocolate, just to heat it through.

Add 3 tablespoons of Canola Oil to your milk chocolate chips and white chocolate chips and microwave them at 30-second increments. I didn't take more pictures of the chocolate because mine seized up on me and I had to add more canola oil than I expected to so I could thin it out enough to spread it. But hey, it still worked and still tasted good.

Pour (or spread, depending on if you made the same mistake I did) your chocolate over the peanut butter layer and bake for 10 more minutes.

Once the edges start to get a nice toasted color, take the pan out of the over and let thoroughly cool. If you don't let it cool, the peanut butter cookie layer will be quite crumbly. That's the one thing with gluten-free - there's no gluten to bind the thing together!

These measurements are all guesstimated, because I don't measure shit. 

Ingredients:

Peanut butter cookie layer
1 cup walnuts
2 cup gluten-free pretzels
1/2 cup gluten-free baking mix
3 cup peanut butter
3 Tbsp melted butter (vegans substitute coconut oil)
1/4 cup powdered sugar

Chocolate layer
2 cups milk chocolate chips (vegan chocolate or carob)
3/4 cup white chocolate chips (honestly I only added these because I didn't have a ton of milk chocolate chips so you can omit them if you hate white chocolate)
1/4 cup Canola Oil

Let this thing cool for at least an hour before eating. Hot peanut butter is sure to burn the roof of your mouth. Trust me, I learned the hard way.

So you gluten-intolerant folks out there, enjoy some good ol' fashioned peanut butter bars. Also, egg allergy peeps - you can try this too! And I've added substitutes for a vegan option, which shouldn't be too difficult either. In case you were wondering, I'm not gluten-intolerant myself, but my mother is and my sister has Celiac, so with 50% of our household not eating gluten, I try not to make things they can't have. That would make me a selfish asshole. Plus, cutting back on refined white flour is not always a bad thing.

Bake on, friends!