#5: Bellara's Nutterbar
Because we needed a desert, and because it's difficult to look at that icon without needing one of these in your life.
Once again, we didn't know what a Nutterbar was, buy we could take a guess. A bar of peanut butter held together by chocolate? That didn't sound all that great. We decided to try and make a kind of super-nutty Rocky Road that we could bake in a sheet and then cut into bars. That sounded like a good time.
The nice thing about Rocky Road is that unlike muffins, cake, jelly, pies, brownies, whatever, it's just about impossible to screw it up and looks beautiful. You also get to enjoy the sickly-sweet experience of melting whole bars of chocolate.
We used cooking chocolate, which is like regular chocolate except much cheaper with the solitary disadvantage that it tastes terrible. Being a genius, the girl fixed this by adding cocoa and butter to the melt. We also added crunchy peanut butter before pouring it over our mess of chopped marshmallows and mixed nuts to set. THE DELICIOUS RESULT:
The surprise here is how strongly you can taste the salted peanuts we used. We knew salt and chocolate went well together, but we didn't expect the resulting flavour to be so hot and fiery. Interesting! But ultimately not quite nutty enough. For our finished Nutterbar recipe we decided we'd need even more nuts and even more nut-related butter.
Bellara's Nutterbar recipe:
Makes approx 10 Nutterbars
400g chocolate
200g peanut butter
200g mixed nuts
200g salted peanuts
Marshmallows
1: Chop your marshmallows. Scissors might be best. Put the chopped marshmallows and nuts into a large bowl. Also, line a baking tray or tin with tinfoil.
2: On a medium heat melt your chocolate and peanut butter in a saucepan and mix together. Add cocoa and butter to taste if you're using cooking chocolate.
3: Once the chocolate mix is good and liquidy, pour most of it into the bowl with marshmallows and nuts and mix it all together with a spoon. As your chocolate cools it's going to set hard, so don't get distracted.
4: Pour or scrape the chocolate/nut/marshmallow mix into the baking tray, and pour the last of the liquid chocolate over the top. Finally, bung the whole thing in the fridge for 20 minutes.
5: Remove, dust the top with caster sugar and cut your choclatey, nutty tile into bars. Or eat it whole. Your call.