Ina’s Peanut Butter and Jelly Bars from Barefoot Contessa At Home

Last night, on a whim I felt that I was in the mood to bake. So, naturally, I chose an Ina recipe. I figured since it was late and a weeknight it would be best and easiest to bake something from the “Dessert” sections of the cookbooks. I thumbed through each of the 11 books I currently own, narrowed it down to three top choices then picked from those three.

And the Peanut Butter & Jelly Bars won….mainly due to the fact that I needed a limited number of ingredients from the grocery store.

After heading to the local Big Y, standing in line for almost 10 minutes while the elderly woman in front of me took her sweet time loading her groceries on the cashier’s conveyor belt, I started baking.

Everything was going well until I got to the part where I had to add the flour. Ina calls for 3 cups of flour for this recipe. I had the flour, but it was a new bag so the flour was more compact than usual and I think I added probably an extra tablespoon or two just because the flour was too packed in the cups.

This recipe looks easy, but peanut butter is hard to handle and I learned that cleaning up anything that had peanut butter in it can be challenging! Also, due to the my inclination that the mixture had too much flour, the dough itself was hard to spread.

It was more annoying than hard to make these. But after they baked and cool, I was impressed! They were so sweet and delicious and I doubt they will last very long in the house.

Disclaimer: I am not a photographer by any means. And I only have an iPhone 8 as a camera, so please bare with me on the sub-par photos.

Cheers!