Recipe #25 - Peanut Butter and Jam Bars

Tuesday is a big day at our house -- BACK TO SCHOOL!  It is one of my favorite holidays.  To celebrate, we had a back to school party.  Serious.  And I needed a treat to serve, so I consulted by handy dandy cookbook and decided on Peanut Butter and Jam Bars. Perfecto!

This recipe can be found on page 214 or online here.

First you cream together your shortening and sugars.

Once that is light and fluffy, you add the peanut butter, eggs and vanilla.

And then you add in the flour and other dry ingredients.

The dough that you end up with looks a lot like peanut butter cookie dough.

You reserve one cup of the dough and set it aside.

And pat the reminder into the bottom of a 9x13 pan.

Next you spread the jam over the top of the dough.

Then you have two options.  You can either crumble the reserved pieces over the jam or you can flatten small pieces into "discs" and lay them over the jam.  I flattened them in hopes of having flat-ish bars.  Takes some time to do this though.  I would be curious to see what crumbling looks like when it comes out of the oven.

The flattening technique sort of looks like a bad skin graft...

Then you bake it for 20-30 minutes until it is set and barely golden.  Mine took 20 minutes.  Let it cool completely.

When its cool, you mix together all the glaze ingredients and whisk until smooth. 

Then you spread the glaze over the bars and let it set a bit before cutting into the bars.

I opted to cut mine into triangles to make them look like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

The recipe says it makes 12 large bars.  They would have to be pretty large bars though.  I think the triangles were the perfect size and we had tons of them.  Sorry, I should have counted.

So the question is: were they good?  To me, they tasted a lot like a PB&J sandwich, just sweeter.  Most of the kids really liked them.  Just a couple kids didn't care for them.  Here's the verdict: 

The three kids on the bottom of the side were the only that didn't care for them.  Everyone else enjoyed them!  Happy Back to School Day everyone!