By Natalia Gill, from An Appetite For Joy
Peanut butter, unrefined sugar, coconut oil and vanilla are combined, hardened in the freezer then sliced into bite-sized morsels of bliss. These silky, sweet & salty little chips taste divine on their own, but this is a dangerous path to tread! I try to reserve them for a special treat atop ice cream or in cookies and other baked goods.
You may also want to check out the many other mouth-watering peanut butter recipes on this blog!
It was my 3-year old daughter who first opened the door to peanut butter chips. We were shopping at Trader Joe’s when she made the decision to place a bag into her kid-sized cart. My knee-jerk reaction was to quickly and nicely veto it, then redirect her to the dried mango. But I paused and skimmed the ingredients. Could have been worse. I decided to stroke her confidence and bring them home.
Last time she did this I ended up with 5 cans of sardines! I got a little creative them them.
How these chips act in baking (it’s a little different)
When you take out the additives, and use unprocessed ingredients, peanut butter chips melt at a lower temperature. So you have to store these in the freezer then take them out immediately before you use them.
- In cookies and scones they work perfectly, leaving little pockets of gooey goodness.
- In muffins they leave somewhat concentrated pockets of peanut butter but they get absorbed by the muffin so there is no change in texture. Could be a good thing, but I’m just letting you know what to expect. (I’ve only tried them in coconut flour muffins, so they might act differently with less spongy flours.)
- In waffles & pancakes – I haven’t tried this yet but I’m assuming they will work similar to the cookies since they are cooked quickly.
- Over ice cream they are absolutely delicious!
Using unrefined powdered sugar
You’ll need to use powdered sugar in these. Thankfully making your own unrefined powdered sugar is easy!
I have also tried a different method, leaving the sugar un-powdered and melting all the ingredients over the stove. For whatever reason, I had a surprisingly difficult time getting the coconut sugar to melt so powdering your sugar first is definitely the way to go.
UPDATE: I think melting the ingredients gently on the stove-top then cooling would work. I thought the coconut sugar wasn’t melting but now I realize that the graininess I was tasting was the texture in the natural peanut butter – it was more prominent when it was melted. I think the graininess would be unnoticeable when cooled!
I hope you enjoy them!
- 1 cup peanut butter
- ¼ cup coconut oil
- ¼ cup powdered coconut palm sugar or powdered sucanat (it's easy to make your own)
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- Sea salt, to taste (if your peanut butter is not salted)
- Stir together the ingredients until smooth.
- Pour into a parchment paper lined baking pan (mine was 9x13)
- Freeze for 1 hour
- Slice up into chips (for best results, place the pan on cooling packs when doing this)
- Store in the freezer until immediately before use
Almond and sunflower seed butters would also work well.