Hello! I’d say happy Wednesday, but it’s…just Wednesday. The Wednesday after a holiday weekend in the middle of a pandemic. Happy is a stretch.
But you know what is happy—er, what is making me happy? This Easy Stovetop Peanut Butter Granola. It’s super crisp, crunchy and peanut buttery, and took fifteen whole minutes to make. That’s the magic of stovetop granola. When you skip the oven, it takes 1/3 of the time! Oh, and it only makes a quart. Add this to the list of small batch recipes we all need this year!
This isn’t my first go-round with peanut butter granola or stovetop granola. Nope! This is a combination of two of my favorite granolas for maximum efficiency. Maximum efficiency is important when we’re discussing how to get Easy Stovetop Peanut Butter Granola into our faces. We’re trying to do it efficiently. To that end, there are five steps in the stovetop granola-making process and they’re all super easy.
Combine the wet ingredients. Whisk your oil, brown sugar, maple syrup, natural peanut butter, vanilla, cinnamon and salt together in a measuring cup. This provides the majority of the flavor in your granola and help it get good and crispy.
Toast the dry ingredients. Combine your oats and chopped peanuts in a heavy pan over medium heat. Stir them around for about 10 minutes, until fragrant and a little darker in color. Don’t burn ‘em.
Add the wet ingredients to the dry. Pour your peanut butter/maple/brown sugar/oil mixture into the oats and peanuts.
Toast everything together. This is the part where you stir everything for another five minutes, until the sticky stuff is all absorbed and everything has darkened and smells very peanut buttery.
Cool. Scatter your granola on a rimmed baking sheet on a rack and let it come to room temperature. This is the part where your granola gets real good and crispy while you decide how you want to serve it. I highly recommend yogurt, raspberries and an artful drizzle of peanut butter.
You may notice that Easy Stovetop Peanut Butter Granola isn’t particularly cluster-prone. This doesn’t bother me in the slightest, but if you are a cluster person, you can reduce the oats and peanuts down to three cups total volume and keep everything else the same. Alternatively, swap the maple syrup for a thicker sweetener like honey or brown rice syrup, and maybe bump it up to 5-6 tablespoons. Either of those should work some clustering magic.
But, real talk? This salty-sweet stuff is already pretty magical. I mean, maybe this year has lowered my expectations, but peanut butter granola you can make in fifteen minutes? Magic.
Easy Stovetop Peanut Butter Granola
makes about a quart
1/4 cup olive oil (or coconut oil or canola oil)
1/4 cup light brown sugar, packed
1/4 cup well-stirred natural peanut butter (creamy-style works too)
1/4 cup pure maple syrup
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon Kosher or sea salt
2 cups old-fashioned oats
1 1/2 cups honey-roasted or salted peanuts, roughly chopped
Line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment. Set aside.
Combine oil, brown sugar, peanut butter, maple syrup, vanilla, cinnamon and salt in a liquid measuring cup. Whisk together with a fork. Set aside.
Heat a large, heavy-bottomed skillet over medium heat. Add oats and chopped peanuts. Cook, stirring constantly, until very fragrant and toasted (about 10 minutes). Do not burn.
Add liquid ingredients and stir to coat the oats and peanuts. Continue cooking, stirring constantly for 4-5 additional minutes, until sweeteners are incorporated and granola no longer looks wet.
Remove granola from heat. Transfer mixture to parchment-lined pan and allow to cool completely.
Store granola in an airtight container at room temperature for up to three weeks.
Do you think Nancy Meyers knows how many lives she changed when she wrote peanut butter and Oreos into the 1998 remake of The Parent Trap? Mine, for one, and probably millions more. Certainly more than when she had Meryl Streep make croissants in It’s Complicated (and in an absurdly short period of time, I might add). Probably way less than when Steve Martin had a meltdown over the quantity disparity between packages of hot dogs and hot dog buns in Father of the Bride. That one still hasn’t been resolved.
Anyway, since I started baking, I’ve thrown peanut butter and Oreos into many recipes because they just *work.* This salty, creamy, bittersweet combination is one of the easiest ways to take a dessert from fine to fabulous.
Today’s offering is one you probably saw coming from a mile away: No-Churn Peanut Butter Cookies & Cream Ice Cream! Of course—of course!—I was going to combine them in an ice cream someday. And by someday, I mean today, which just so happens to be National Ice Cream Day. I swear I didn’t plan it like that.
Oh yes, it’s the big chunks of Oreo cookie that are the real magic here. That’s one thing I have a lot of feelings about: big chunks of cookie instead of cookie crumbs in my cookies & cream. It’s not called crumbs & cream, am I right?!
Actually, this whole situation is heaven. Cold, creamy, sweet & salty, Oreo-studded heaven piled in a cone.
Sometimes you—and by “you,” I mean “I”—want a dessert that is purely about peanut butter. No 
You should make these, period. They’re a peanut butter lover’s paradise! Two layers of crispy peanut butter cookie are sandwiched together with a thick layer of peanut butter caramel and then sliced into crumbly, chewy bars. It’s like someone—and by “someone,” I mean “I”— took my favorite 
They’re easy to make, too! Start by mixing up a crumbly peanut butter and oat dough, tossing in some chopped roasted peanuts for good measure. Pack half of it down, and then drizzle on a bunch of caramel candy that you’ve melted with peanut butter and heavy cream. Mmhmm.
Finish it all off with the remaining dough and then bake until the edges are golden and the caramel bubbles up in a few spots and then—and this is very important—let them cool completely.
I’m serious! Don’t be tempted to slice these (or any 
Yes, the caramel is the star of this show, but don’t sleep on those cookie layers. Crispy, crunchy, buttery, salty-sweet, crumbly cookie held together by caramel? Sign me up! These bars will crumble at bit when you bite in, but it’s not a bad thing. In fact, it’s a very good thing.
If you are into rich, thick, salty-sweet, intensely peanut buttery peanut butter things…well, let me introduce you to your new favorite cake. This Flourless Peanut Butter Cake is the sort of thing that you can whip together for a casual night in (also known as every night right now) or dress it up for a birthday or dinner party (when dinner parties are a thing again).
This recipe is a play on the three ingredient 
This cake is almost exactly the same thing, except that I add a few more eggs, a pinch of salt and a little vanilla, and bake it all up in a cake pan. The result is a little chewy at the edges and tender in the center—think somewhere between 
After the cake has cooled, garnish all up to you. Leave it plain, dust with powdered sugar, serve with ice cream, make it into 
Today marks fifty days of lockdown in NYC, so I felt the need to jazz it up a little. I nuked chocolate chips and peanut butter until smooth, then loaded it into a bag, snipped a tiny corner and drizzled til I liked what I saw. The border is just chopped roasted peanuts and mini peanut butter cups from Trader Joe’s. I know it’s gilding the lily, but like…what else are we doing seven weeks in?
Until a few weeks 
And while muffin/cupcake liners are the obvious solution to that problem, there was another to contend with: I was not terribly confident in my base muffin recipe. But then I went and tested the crap out of my 
You read that right: Brown Butter. Nutella Swirl. Muffins. Basically every good thing in the world in a handheld treat that is somehow suitable for consumption at breakfast.
The recipe for these muffins has a few adjustments from the Lemon Poppy Seed version, but not many. Besides the obvious flavor difference, there’s a little more flour and I swapped some of the milk for sour cream, making the batter a little thicker so the Nutella swirls don’t sink.
And speaking of Nutella swirls, they are applied in two phases. Basically, you add half the batter to the muffin cups, then swirl in some Nutella, then top with the remaining batter and swirl in remaining Nutella.
Y’all, these are so good. The interiors are feather soft and the Nutella swirls make every bite extra decadent, as all things with Nutella should be. Also, there’s a little variance in each bite—you could have a little Nutella or you could have a lot! The brown butter is subtle, as it is in my 
e2 bakes brooklyn 