3 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cereal Bars

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3 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cereal Bars; sweet and salty cereal bars that provide the perfect balance of crunchy and chewy, with great nutty flavour!

This week, I accidentally procured almost a kilo of Cheerios.

Food shopping has become a pretty tiresome affair since this time last year. Our flat is in the city centre and we don’t have a car, meaning that food either comes from expensive tiny shops, online supermarket deliveries, or (on payday) Deliveroo. The supermarket deliveries have been our most common choice during lockdown restrictions. While they are convenient, and a modern marvel at times, they can lead to uninspiring scrolls through the same brands you see every week with little inspiration. In an exceptionally adventurous mood (lol), I threw a box of Cheerios into the online basket this week. And of course, in the swirling haze of boredom and chaos that lockdown life is when you’re working full time, I fecked it up.

A 700g box of cereal, akin to some comedically large American cartoon version, arrived. It doesn’t fit anywhere in the kitchen, so has now become a very affordable and practical ornament on our worktop.

After posting about this mundane but nonsensical occurrence on TikTok, a lovely commenter suggested some Cheerios recipes in a bid to use up this wheat-field-in-a-box. Who was I to resist?

As a result, Saturday morning was spent melting and stirring various things together in the hope that something tasty would come out at the end of it. While it only got me through about a fifth of this enormous box, the end product was worthwhile.

Many homemade cereal bar recipes seem to fall into either the category of a) loads of butter and marshmallows or b) a painfully scant amount of natural peanut butter and honey. The balance between pure dessert and obviously health-conscious breakfast isn’t that common. That’s what I’m hoping to give you with today’s recipe, especially as I know I’m due to eat a LOT of these in the coming week!

These 3 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cereal Bars are a little bridge between treat and healthy snack. With a helping of healthy fats and protein from Pip & Nut’s unmatched peanut butter, and a dose of structurally essential and deliciously sweet marshmallows. You won’t find these tooth-tinglingly sweet, and they don’t feel like you’re eating a Nature Valley bar. You’ll get the dreamy coupling of sweet and savoury at once. They make a nice light breakfast, or a satisfying snack to tide you through these long days.

I chose to use my favourite peanut butter ever in these bars, Pip & Nut. They were very good to me recently and gifted me a big care package of their delicious nut butters. Both crunchy or smooth peanut butter works in this recipe, but (as with every recipe that requires peanut butter) I personally prefer crunchy. As for the marshmallows, you can go as posh or cheap as you like, I opted for a bag of pink and whites that were lingering at the back of the baking cupboard.

As with all Maverick Baking recipes, this recipe is dripping with TEXTURE. The Cheerios, or most other cereals you could choose, stay wonderfully crisp and crunchy. The peanut butter and marshmallow mixture melds together to create a gloriously squidge and chew between the crunches.

You can whip the mixture up in under 10 minutes, and after about half an hour of setting at room temperature, you’ll have a full batch of Peanut Butter Cereal Bars to enjoy. You don’t need to turn the oven on, you don’t need to shuffle your whole fridge around to find space for these. Nice and easy.

As long as you have a bowl, a pan, a spatula, and a square tin or dish, you’re all set.

Hopefully this month is treating you well so far, whatever level of restrictions you’re under. It’s starting to feel like we have a bit of light at the end of the tunnel here. Finally. In the meantime, I’m staying put on the couch with these Peanut Butter Cereal Bars and a pint of tea.

I also hope you love this recipe. It’s definitely one I’ll be trying out with other cereals in future if I ever finish this box of Cheerios – imagine it with Crunchy Nut Cornflakes…

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To make these 3 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cereal Bars, simply follow the recipe below:

BE A MAVERICK: why not try this recipe with Rice Krispies or Frosties or Crunchy Nut Cornflakes instead?

These 3 Ingredient Peanut Butter Cereal Bars will keep well for up to 3 days in an airtight container or covered cake stand. No need to refrigerate!