Thick and chewy peanut butter pretzel blondies! This easy-to-make dessert recipe comes together in minutes with no hand mixer required. It’s full of flavor from the peanut butter and the pretzels give it the best crunchy texture.
Molly here from What Molly Made! I’ve been sharing recipes on The Stay at Home Chef for a few months now and I’m so grateful to be back sharing another one with you. And this one just so happens to be one of my favorite.
I recently saw a quote on Instagram that said, “peanut butter is the glue that holds life together.” And it made me laugh, but it’s also kinda true. Because peanut butter really is a magical ingredient that brightens my day. It’s one of my all time favorite ingredients to bake with.
The flavor alone adds so much depth to a recipe. I love peanut butter cookies, bars, dips and more. If it involves peanut butter you don’t need to sell me on it. There’s a good chance I’ll already be in love.
For that reason I’m always looking for new ways to incorporate peanut butter into my recipes. I love to pair peanut butter with another ingredient (i.e. chocolate, jelly) because it pairs so well with other things. With these blondies I went with pretzels because it has such a nice crunch and texture when you bite into them.
Not to mention the yummy salt on the pretzels!
The base of the peanut butter pretzel blondies is simple: a classic blondie recipe. But there are a few reasons why these classic blondies are so good:
- All of the brown sugar in this recipe makes these peanut butter pretzel blondies super chewy. Brown sugar is just a mix of white sugar and molasses so it provides so much depth of flavor and chewy texture.
- The melted butter in these peanut butter pretzel blondies also adds extra chew to the blondies. It also means we don’t have to use an electric mixer:) It’s because we aren’t looking to introduce air into the butter and sugar to create air bubbles and a cake-y texture. In fact, we want the opposite to create a thick and chewy texture. Which is why the melted butter is whisked with the brown sugar quickly.
- The last and other super important ingredient to create chew is three whole eggs. They aid in leavening the blondies and add fat and chew to the recipe and helps bind everything together.
Once you have the base of these peanut butter pretzel blondies it’s easy to add great peanut butter flavor! I added peanut butter in two ways: creamy peanut butter and peanut butter chips.
The creamy peanut butter adds depth and the peanut butter chips add additional texture and a bit of surprise when someone bites in to them. The other piece to the texture of these blondies are of course, the pretzels.
Broken up pieces of pretzels are mixed in the actual batter and then I even went one step further and added a full pretzel on the top. This is definitely optional but I felt like it added some serious appetite appeal to these peanut butter pretzel blondies and helped show you what’s on the inside of these bars.
I placed one pretzel a few inches away from each other and strategically placed them so that I would have one pretzel neatly in the center of each square when I baked and cut them. It actually helped me cut even squares too:)
Wait until the bars are completely cooled before cutting in to them. I melted semi-sweet chocolate to drizzle over the top of these peanut butter pretzel blondies.
Because what’s better than peanut butter, pretzels, AND chocolate?
