Guest post: oatmeal peanut butter chocolate chip bars - Dairy Foods

If you happen to be on Weight Watchers (or any diet) slowly back away from the computer screen. Seriously. These bars are diet-breaking delicious. I probably shouldn't admit it but I ate about 6 of them over the weekend.  Yup...that's what you call going over your points. 

This amazing recipe comes from Jewel of Eat Drink Shop Love blog.  We collaborated on this post together, she sent me the recipe and I took the photos.  My sister came over to help bake (well...eat) the bars and the heart shaped bar was her idea.  Cute, huh?

As told by Jewel:

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies are my all time favorite dessert. When Jenna asked me to share one of my favorite recipes with her readers. I wanted to share something easy that everyone could bake in his or her kitchen. Instead of making traditional cookies I decide to bake them as bars. So today, I’m going to share with you a recipe for cookie bars. I found several recipes on the Internet for different types of cookie bars but I decided to add oatmeal and peanut butter to mine.

I made these for my office because they have been dying for me to bring sweets into work and they raved about them.

You need to set about an hour and a half out of your schedule to prep and bake these. Mix all these ingredients in a mixer for about 15-20 minutes and then bake for 45-50 minutes. I used my perfect brownie pan to make sure the bars turned out great. If you don’t have a pan like mine, you can use a 13 X 9 or 9 X 9 deep dish-baking pan.


Oatmeal Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Bars (adapted from Bakerella)

Ingredients:

2 3/4 cup all purpose flour

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt
1 ½ stick of butter, softened

2 cups of light brown sugar
3 eggs

1 teaspoon of vanilla
 extract
1 ½ cup of chocolate chips
1/2-cup oatmeal
1 tablespoon of peanut butter (optional)

Preparation:

Pre-Heat Oven to 350

Sift flour; add baking powder and salt to a large bowl. In a separate bowl, combine butter and sugar using a mixer until blended. Add eggs, one at a time to sugar mixture, mix on low. The mixture should begin to become creamy. Add vanilla extract to the mix. 
Add flour and mix until combined. Stir in Chocolate chips, Oatmeal, and Peanut Butter. (If you are allergic to peanuts a good substitute would be caramel)

Spray the sides of pan with cooking spray.

Bake at 350 degrees for 45 to 50 minutes or until top is golden brown. Make sure you don’t over bake.

Note: If the top starts to brown to quickly cover with foil and continue to bake.

Be sure to check out Jewel's blog, it's all about food, fashion and lots of pretty things.  Thanks so much to Jewel for sending this amazing recipe and guest posting on Eat Drink Pretty today!