Crispy Peanut Butter Treats with Chocolate Chips. OMG, YUM!

I've come to the conclusion that I am cursed with a chronic inability to 1- follow a recipe, 2- have all of the ingredients... and ok 3- measure correctly. Generally these are the reasons for 99% of my kitchen disasters, thus the reason I never cook, and why I buy so much crap/convenience food. Well check this out... thanks to Alicia's amazingly variable recipes in TKD, I can royally screw them up/not follow the directions and they turn out FABULOUS! Did you see my random variation of like 2 of her burrito recipes from yesterday? YUM!

This Crispy Peanut Butter Treats with Chocolate Chips recipe is one that I read about on her website thekindlife.com and everyone, I mean EVERYONE loved them! And the way she writes about them in her book, it's a sure-fire hit! So of course I had the drama from my three above-mentioned cooking pitfalls. 1- I couldn't find the required '1 box brown rice crisps cereal' So I got 'puffed spelt.' What is spelt? not sure... but it looked like honey smacks and that seemed good enough at the time. 2- the 'puffed spelt' box seemed really small, maybe 3/4 or less the size of a normal cereal box. the recipe called for a whole box, but on the kindlife.com forums people mentioned the batch was huge and they get stale too fast. Sooo I used 3/4 of the 'puffed spelt' and then about 1/2 the brown rice syrup (can I mention this is really good stuff? It smelled sick and was thicker than molassas... seriously! but yum!) and then I used 1/2 the peanut butter.

I combined the ingredients, I used less bowls than it said (why can't you mix in the same pan that they will set up in?). And I was on the fence about adding carob chips. At the last second I added a handful just to the top. That was it, no banking, just letting the peanut butter / rice syrup mixture cool and then cut and eat.

Alicia starts the recipe for these with:

"These little yummies will blow your mind. Everyone- and I mean everyone - in your life will love these."

I wanted to believe her... I really did but sometimes I tend to think these poor vegans chefs haven't had 'real food' in so long they think their own food is soo good when it isn't. Well guess what? This was freaking rockin! I could have eaten the whole batch. And trust me, if I reallllly wanted to I could have, but because there is something in the rice syrup that isn't as 'addictive' (I'm just quoting the book here, I don't know for sure. Sugar is the Devil, ask the girls from the "Skinny Bitch" series) it's like I could have one square, be perfectly happy, have a super happy belly and stop eating. Kind of amazing. And I'm a self-confessed binger if something is as good as these are.

I decided that instead of cutting these into 9 or 12 (remember, I made a smaller batch to begin with) I would cut them into 6 LARGE squares and have them for breakfast. I put each in a ziplock bag to keep them fresh and take one to work. They are SOOOOO good. I would compare them to like a caramel/nut sort of thing. I happen to LOVE the taste of carob (I was brought up on it) but I think the recipe says non-dairy chocolate chips work too.

This is yet again, another recipe that gets 2 thumbs way up... and I didn't even really follow the recipe!