Peanut butter cup protein bars - five ingredients, fifteen minutes, no baking
What to do when you see a promising recipe on an obnoxious food blog? That’s right, give it that trashy depression snack appeal. Puffed quinoa works well here cause it’s really small and rich in protein. Use rice crispies if you can’t find it or it’s not in your budget. Oats or a larger cereal probably wouldn’t stick together properly.
Ingredients:
250g crunchy peanut butter
2 servings or 24g of pb2
50g of chopped chocolate (use milk to truly get the Reese’s flavour profile)
2tbsp or 30ml of maple or golden syrup
30g or thereabouts of puffed quinoa
A small square pie dish or loaf tin, lined with clingfilm (optional)
In a big bowl, measure out the peanut butter, pb2 and maple syrup. Lightly oil the measuring spoon for the maple syrup, and it drops right out. Combine everything with a fork. Add the chocolate and mix again. Now slowly start adding the quinoa/rice crispies until you get a crumbly texture that still sticks together when pressed into a ball. In the end you will probably start kneading instead of using the fork.
Turn your mix out into your pie dish or loaftin and start knuckling down. The better your compress it, the easier it will be to portion and store. Cover with another layer of clingfilm and put into the fridge. Refrigerate for a few hours or overnight before slicing into nine or ten bars.
If you don’t have a suitable dish, just form them into balls.
These will never be super firm at room temperature, but you can wrap them into clingflim individually and store in the fridge or freezer, and then just transfer one to your lunchbox the day of or grab one on the way out or grab one or two or three when it’s 4pm and you haven’t eaten yet.
They deliver a respectable 8 to 10 g of protein per bar, have less sugar per 100g than a flimsy overpriced granola bar from the grocery store and they’re dirt cheap to make.
