It’s BAKED.  It’s SUNDAY.  It’s MORNING!

And it’s what I just had for breakfast!  Hey friends….I can justify anything!  But look at this!  Creamy peanut butter with strawberry jam and a crumbly oat topping all sitting pretty on a sweet, pastry crust!  Those ingredients speak breakfast to me!  Or lunch.  Or dessert.  Or a midnight snack!  Baked Sunday Mornings is a wonderful group of people who love Baked Explorations, a fabulous cookbook by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito.   This week, we baked an upscale version of the classic peanut butter and jelly bar.

To me, this is almost like eating a fancy sandwich.  The peanut butter becomes almost mousse-like and is topped with your favorite jam (which for me, in PB & J’s is always strawberry!) and sandwiched between a sweet crust and a brown sugar and oatmeal crumble.  A little slice goes a very long way…it is pretty rich!  The recipe is a little bit time/labor intensive.  The dough is made, then chilled, then rolled and fitted to your baking dish, and chilled; and then blind baked while the peanut butter concoction is mixed and the oat topping is created.  This is where I’ve learned to be patient in baking and I don’t mind jumping through a lot of hoops to get a good product. 

The only stumbling point for me was when making the crust.  The ingredient list called for 1 large egg.  But in the directions for making the crust, it called for us to whisk the ‘eggs’.  And when I put everything in the food processor, my ingredients didn’t come together as I had expected.  It was pretty dry and not holding together to form a dough.  Which led me to question, did the authors mean for us to use 2 eggs?  So I added another and it worked out just fine.  Well worth the work and the wait.  All in all, on a scale of 1-5, I’ll give this 4 scrumptious whisks!

Please head over to Baked Sunday Mornings for this recipe; and to check out what my fellow baking buddies thought of this recipe!