Thick and Chewy Peanut Butter Pretzel Blondies! This easy-to-make dessert recipe comes together in minutes, no hand mixer required. It’s loaded with peanut butter flavor, and the pretzels give it the best crunchy texture.
molly from here what did molly do! I’ve been sharing recipes on The Stay at Home Chef for several months now and I’m so excited to be back to share another recipe with you. And this one happens to be one of my favorites.
I recently saw a quote on Instagram that said, “Peanut butter is the glue that holds life together.” It made me laugh, but it’s also true. Because peanut butter truly is the magic ingredient that brightens up my day. This is one of my all-time favorite ingredients for baking.
The flavor alone adds a lot of depth to the recipe. I love peanut butter cookies, chocolate bars, dips, and more. If it involves peanut butter, you don’t need to sell me. Chances are I’m already in love.
For this reason, I’m always looking for new ways to incorporate peanut butter into my recipes. I like to pair peanut butter with another ingredient (ie chocolate, jelly) because it goes well with other things. For these blondies, I chose pretzels because of the great crunch and texture when you bite into them.
Not to mention the delicious salt on the pretzels!
The base for Peanut Butter Pretzel Blondies is simple: the classic blondie recipe. But there are a few reasons why these classic blondes work so well:
- All the brown sugar in this recipe makes these Peanut Butter Pretzel Blondies super chewy. Brown sugar is just white sugar mixed with molasses, so it provides such a rich flavor and chewy texture.
- The melted butter in these Peanut Butter Pretzel Blondies also adds crunch to the blondies. It also means we don’t have to use an electric mixer 🙂 This is because we don’t want to introduce air into the butter and sugar to create air bubbles and a cake-like texture. In fact, we wanted the opposite to create a thick and chewy texture. That’s why melted butter is whisked quickly with brown sugar.
- The last and very important ingredient in making the chews are three whole eggs. They help ferment blondies and add fat and chew to recipes and help bind everything together.
Once you have the base for these Peanut Butter Pretzel Blondies, it’s easy to add great peanut butter flavor! I add peanut butter in two ways: creamy peanut butter and peanut butter chips.
The creamy peanut butter adds depth, and the peanut butter chips add extra texture and a little surprise when someone bites into them. The other part of these blondies is of course the pretzels.
Broken pretzel pieces were mixed in the actual batter, and then I even went a step further and added a whole pretzel on top. This is definitely optional, but I feel like it adds some zing to these Peanut Butter Pretzel Blondies and helps show you the inside of these bars.
I place one pretzel a few inches apart from each other and position them strategically so that when I bake and cut them I have a pretzel neatly in the center of each square. It actually helped me cut the square too 🙂
Wait until the bar is completely cool before cutting into it. I melted semi-sweet chocolate and drizzled over the top of these Peanut Butter Pretzel Blondies.
Because what’s better than peanut butter, pretzels, and chocolate?