PBCBs

             Now that I am on break, I have lots of time to both dream up and more importantly execute some wonderful treats.... thankfully I have lots of wonderful people in my life to give these wonderful treats to ! As you will soon see, it would be bad news bears if I was left to alone to consume every last one of my..... ahhhh I need to think of a name right now... how about... peanut butter crunch bites! (more like peanut butter CRACK bites, but we will keep it PG here).  The scary thing about these PBCBs (you are free to have the acronym stand for anything you want) is that they are very very very easy to make...... like, a little bit TOO easy to make.   So if you are ever in a pinch and need to win people over really quickly (since we all now that is the only reason to give people delicious food in the first place) these would be a very intelligent, reliable choice.  I know I say this in pretty much every one of my posts, but there is really no way that peanut butter, powdered sugar, butter and chocolate can go wrong.  I guess I sort of took a risk adding in pretzels and peanut butter chips, but I am pretty darn sure that everything turned out ok.

            I realize that this recipe does not actually call for Gertrude (hence the fact that they were just SO easy to make...Gertrude makes everything harder), so Gertrude was just an innocent bystander in this operation.  The first step was to make the peanut butter goo: 

1 cup crunchy peanut-butter (you can use creamy, but that would take away from the CRUNCH part) 

1/4 cup softened unsalted butter

1 cup powdered sugar

2 cup crispy rice cereal 

for this step, just mix the peanut butter, butter and sugar together until you have a homogenous mixture,  and finish by adding the cereal.  Now what you are going to do is get a piece of wax paper and roll balls the size of a gumball (about forty balls total from the mixture).  

Now, it gets fun.  Get mini pretzels that are either square shaped or circle shaped to make little sandwiches with the peanut butter goo.  When I was at the store, I was planning on getting square pretzels, but for some reason, despite having 20 different types of pretzels, they did not have square pretzels at the store.  The only type that was similar was a bag of checkered circular pretzels.  These were labeled as "butter-rich", which I was a bit skeptical about, but I figured since we have peanut BUTTER and unsalted BUTTER, BUTTER-rich pretzels would beautifully complement the other ingredients.  

So basically, sandwich the peanut butter balls between two unbroken pretzels and press down just a little bit.  It is ok if there is some overflow, because you are going to be dipping these in chocolate anyways.  

Now, get 18 ounces chocolate candy melts.  After they were 2/3 of the way done melting (per the instructions on the bag), I added about 3/4 cup of peanut butter chips in the bowl to add a little touch of peanut butter to the taste (because you can never have enough peanut butter, right??).  Then I proceeded to dip each pretzel sandwich in the chocolate and then let it sit on the wax paper.  I was feeling creative so I melted the rest of the peanut butter chips and drizzled them over the completed candies.  The final result?? Buh-Bam!!