No Bake Peanut Butter Pretzel Bars

No Bake Peanut Butter Pretzel Bars. Don't you love delicious food that you don't even have to bake! This recipe will satisfy both the sweet craving and the salty craving. They only take 30 minutes to make. And all you need for heat, is a microwave to melt the butter and chocolate chips (or you can do it the old fashioned way on the stove, if your one of those people who doesn't have a microwave). You simply pop them into the freezer and then store in the fridge. Could it get any easier!

Paula Jones is the creator of this recipe, she is a wife and mother and a lover of food! She started her blog to have a place for sharing recipes with her friends and family. She is not a professional chef but a person who is very passionate about food and has turned that passion into a full time job.

Peanut butter and chocolate chips are a classic combination. Although a Canadian named Marcellus Gilmore Edson was the first to patent peanut butter in 1884, peanut butter has been around since the Aztecs. They used to grind peanuts into a paste. The nuts which are actually a legume and not a nut originate from the Bolivian Andes. In the days of Edson it was a common ailment for people to not be able to chew food properly (remember people didn't floss and go to the dentist regularly). So Edson developed peanut butter as a nutritious staple that did not have to be chewed. Peanut butter is a very good source of protein and many other vitamins and minerals.

Chocolate chips as we know them are not quite as old as peanut butter. They have been sold since 1941. Before that a chocolate bar had to be cut up in order to have 'chocolate chips'. Ruth Graves Wakefield, an American from Massachusetts, invented chocolate chip cookies in 1937 by adding cut of pieces of a Nestle bar to cookies. People liked them so much that Nestle added the recipe to the bar wrapper and a little knife to cut up the bar. Ruth received a lifetime supply of chocolate for letting her recipe be printed on the bar. Not long after chocolate chips were born.

It says the caramel sauce in this no bake peanut butter pretzel bars recipe is optional, but it can only make this delicious bar recipe even better! The optional caramel recipe is called whiskey caramel sauce, seriously a caramel sauce with whiskey added. You can make this whiskey caramel sauce recipe to top the no bake peanut butter pretzel bars recipe, but you can also use it on top of ice cream, cake, brownies, doughnuts or it was even suggested to put a spoonful of the sauce into your cup of coffee, it does have whiskey in it, so why not?

For the whiskey caramel sauce recipe you will need extra fine granulated sugar, water, heavy whipping cream, unsalted butter, salt1 cup Dixie Crystals Extra and some Irish whiskey. In a large heavy bottom sauce pan you will start by adding the sugar and water. Then use a wooden spoon, and stir until combined. Cook the sugar and water while stirring continually, over medium-high heat until the mixture begins to boil. Then you can leave alone until the mixture until it turns into a caramel/amber color. Remove the pan from heat when the perfect color is achieved.