Peanut Butter Cookie Bars with Chocolate Porter Ganache

Beer Details

• Beer Style: American Porter
• 5.6
• 30
• Brewery: Karl Strauss

Did I Mention I like Peanut Butter?

It is no surprise that I am a one-trick pony these days. I am proselytizing the hell out of the our lord and savior peanut butter. But can you blame me? I mean, look at how the peanut butter teases the chocolate and visa versa. These two are certainly made for one another.

However, I will keep my biases to myself this week and not torture you with another Belching Beaver Peanut Butter Milk Stout recipe. This week features a beer I have been eying for some time. Ever sine I walked into the Cost Mesa Karl Strauss late last year, I wanted to get my hands on their Peanut Butter Cup Porter. Unfortunately that evening was not my night as they taped out of the porter. Since then, the craft beer hasn’t crossed my mind until I was recently in my favorite bottle shop and spotted it from across the room.

The Mix of Light and Dark Chocolate

The Peanut Butter Cup Porter is dark and toasty in flavor. This is a complete three-sixty from the The Beaver’s Milk stout. It pours black with very little head. The porter’s flavors remind you of that roasted bean flavor stacked on top of a pile of roasted peanuts. Robust is certainly one way to put it. But the peanut butter part was not as pronounced in my nostrils as the roasted peanuts. It was missing that cream that you get from the Belching Beaver Peanut Butter Milk Stout.

I wanted to make peanut butter cookie bars, but was lacking in spent grains, a necessary ingredient in making craft beer cookie bars as adding any water based to a cookie will make for a very bad time. So in order to make this a craft beer recipe, I decides to pour the cookies in a chocolate ganache doused in the Peanut Butter Cup Porter. This was an interesting experiment as the ganache was bound to be on the darker side while the peanut butter cookie was on the creamier side. Lets see if these two flavors play well together.

Smothered in Chocolate Peanut Butter

The richness of the peanut butter chocolate ganache is the most prevalent flavor when it hits your palette. However, not overwhelming whatsoever. Power through that robust flavor and your next met with cream, chocolate, and sugar. This open ups up your palette. They become lighter and milkier. It’s as though your mouth must go through the struggle before seeing the light on the other side of the tunnel. This is an amazing experience that changes halfway through chewing the cookie bars.

As much as I loved this recipe, I am of course curious how this would taste with the Peanut Butter Milk Stout, but I won’t subject you to another recipe…for now…

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Peanut Butter Cookie Bar ingredients

• 3/4 cup of granulated sugar
• 3/4 cup of packed brown sugar
• 1 cup of softened butter
• 1 teaspoon of vanilla
• 1 egg
• 2 1/4 of all purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon of baking soda
• 1/2 teaspoon of salt
• 12 ounces of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Minis

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Ganache ingredients

• 6 ounces of semi-sweet chocolate chips
• 1/4 cup of cream
• 6 fluid ounces of Peanut Butter Cup Porter
• 2 tablespoons of peanut butter

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Peanut Butter Cookie Bars directions

• Heat oven to 375ºF. Lightly grease a square baking pan.
• Mix sugars, butter, vanilla and egg in large bowl. Stir in flour, baking soda and salt Stir Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Minis
• Pour dough into the lightly greased pan. Bake 12-15 minutes or until light brown (might want to cover the edges in tin foil). Let cool.
• Simmer water in a medium sized pot. In a medium sized bowl. Add chocolate chips, peanut butter, cream, and beer into the bowl. Place on top of simmering water to double boil. Constantly stir until chocolate melts and becomes a thick consistency. Be careful not to burn the chocolate. Let cool in the fridge for 1 hour, but be sure to serve at room temperature.

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