With Sop running her half marathon today I needed something easy to bake for work this week, so I went for a Peanut Butter & Jelly tray bake from America’s Test Kitchen’s Family Baking Book.
It starts by creaming 10oz butter and 10oz sugar.
Then a cup of crunchy peanut butter goes in.
Finally 10oz flour, with a teaspoon of baking powder and salt.
Then it’s tin time: 12inch by 9inch tin get foil slinged and oiled.
Then you save a cup of the mixture, which you add about 200g of crushed up roasted salted peanuts.
Then the rest goes into the tray.
This gets baked at 160c fan for 15 minutes.
This gets covered with a pot/cup of jam.
Then this gets covered with sort of hand-flattened dollops of the remaining mixture.
This then gets cooked for 45 mins at 160c fan, then cooled in the tray.
Once cooled it comes out of the sling (a bit tricky as the jam at the edges likes to stick to the foil) and cut into squares or bars.
They taste… OK. It’s peanutty, there’s some jam… but to be honest I’ve have preferred a real PB&J sandwich on cheap white bread!
UPDATE: Soph tasted them and said they were great. And lots of people at work said they were really good (and ate too many off them!). So… I’m happy to stand corrected and declare them a total success! :)
I giggled when I read your description (“to be honest I’ve have preferred a real PB&J sandwich on cheap white bread!”), because that’s pretty much exactly what I thought when I made a similar recipe from the Baked cookbook for their uber-popular pb & j bars. I was reading your post because I saw this recipe in the America’s Test Kitchen Baking Book. I think I’ll move on now – been there, done that! And it’s much easier, and sooooo delicious (pb & j on toast)!
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