No Bake Peanut Butter Pie – My Summer Savior

In my previous post I lamented the fact that summer is not the best time to bake, what with it being sticky and hot and all. Luckily, there are still some sweet treats that can be easily whipped up without the aid of an oven

Like this delicious No Bake Peanut Butter Pie

Ingredients
1 (8 ounce) package cream cheese
1 1/2 cups confectioners’ sugar
1 cup peanut butter
1 cup milk
1 (16 ounce) package frozen whipped topping, thawed
2 (9 inch) prepared graham cracker crusts
Directions
Beat together cream cheese and confectioners’ sugar. Mix in peanut butter and milk. Beat until smooth. Fold in whipped topping.
Spoon into two 9 inch graham cracker pie shells; cover, and freeze until firm.

My Notes:
-I split this recipe in half, as I only needed one pie (although, looking back on it, I should have made two- can never have too much pie!)
-In the picture on allrecipes.com, it looks like there are oreos in/on the pie, so I took that one step further, and used an oreo crust (instead of graham cracker), and I also crumbled up some oreos into the pie itself

It was really delicious – and easy. The perfect summer treat!

Toffee Blondies – Do Blondes Really Have More Fun?

Let me just start out by saying that I hate summer. It’s hot, sticky, and not exactly conducive to heating up an oven for baking. So, I haven’t baked in a while. But this week I decided I was going to bake, and I was going to try something new, and that was that!
Oh, wait, I almost forgot – there is another reason I haven’t been baking much recently – I blame it on this little guy.

Our new puppy Walter – he is amazing, and we have been spending pretty much ALL our free time playing with/cleaning up after/scolding/hugging him
But, now that we are a little more used to life with a dog, I figured it was time to get back into the kitchen!
I let my husband pick out what he wanted me to make, and he landed on these toffee blondies

Ingredients
• Nonstick cooking spray
• 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
• 2 teaspoons salt
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, softened
• 1 cup firmly packed dark brown sugar
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon whole milk
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
• 1 cup chopped chocolate covered toffee
Directions
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
Line a 13 by 9-inch glass pan with parchment paper, leaving a 2-inch overhang and spray with nonstick spray.
Whisk flour and salt together in a small bowl and set aside.
In a large bowl, using a hand held mixer, cream butter and both sugars together until light and fluffy. Slowly add eggs, 1 at a time until thoroughly combined. Add milk, vanilla extract, and peanut butter and continue to mix. Incorporate dry mixture into wet mixture in 3 separate additions. Using a spatula, fold in chocolate covered toffee bits.
Pour batter into prepared pan. Bake in the center rack of the oven for 30 minutes. Remove when toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean. Transfer to a wire rack and allow to cool completely. When cool use cookie cutters to create fun shapes.

My Notes:
-They don’t sell chocolate covered toffee bits at my grocery store, and buying a bunch of heath bars and hammering them into pieces seemed silly, and expensive – so I went with the next best thing – toffee bits and mini chocolate chips

-These took a LOT LONGER than 30 minutes to bake – I ended up having to bake them for 60 minutes and they still seemed undercooked to me, but tasted fine at that point
-I did NOT bother with the cookie cutters – what a waste that would have been, as what would you have done with the “extra” pieces leftover after using cookie cutters? I just cut mine into tiny squares, and it actually made a lot like 40 or so

I honestly didn’t much care for these – you couldn’t taste the toffee (boo!), and overall it just tasted like a peanut butter cookie (which are NOT my favorite). However, others who tried them seemed to like them. If my husband requested them, I would make them again, but I might try and spread the batter out on a cookie sheet instead, making them thinner and hopefully decreasing the baking time!