Further Adventures in Gluttony

Do not eat this many. You will hate me, and yourself.

This weekend I made the homemade version of the Girl Scouts' Peanut Butter Patties. For those of you unfamiliar, the peanut butter patties are essentially Ritz crackers topped with peanut butter and coated in chocolate. For this project, I experimented with the peanut butter and the chocolate: I made some with crunchy PB and some with smooth; some with milk chocolate bark and some with melted semisweet chips.

The resulting cookies were subjected to a rigorous blind-tasting. By that I mean I gave them to my blind co-worker. Anyway, I think the universal favorites were the crunchy PB/ milk chocolate ones. The milk chocolate was also much easier to handle than the semisweet, although the crunchy PB was slightly trickier than the smooth. [A piece of advice: buy the brand-name Ritz crackers. They're less crumbly than the generic version.]

Now a few notes about technique: unlike the Girl Scouts' version of this cookie, I used a Ritz cracker to sandwich the PB. This made for a much easier chocolate dunking. Furthermore, while you can melt the chocolate in the microwave, I prefer to melt it in a bain-marie. I think this gives me more control, and more even melting. The microwave tends to overheat some areas of the bowl and under-heat others.

Finally, I found this the easiest method for coating the PB crackers: drop entire cracker sandwiches, up to 4 or 5 at a time, into the bowl of melted chocolate. Then fish them out of the bowl with a fork, shaking them a little bit to get rid of excess chocolate. Put them on wax paper to let them set. You'll probably want to store them in the refrigerator. And have some milk on hand.