Peanut Butter Morsels

Years in the making, this recipe is freedom from Reese's baking-aisle tyranny. They taste better too. These can be subbed in for some or all of the store-bought baking chips or morsels a recipe might call for. I haven't tested them extensively in recipes that rely on the chips melting into a loose fluid, so your mileage may vary if you want to use them like candy melts.

The ingredients seem a little overly specific, I know. Trust me, this recipe needs it. Without easy access to the sort of stabilizers and emulsifiers that are found in commercial peanut butter chips, the exact chemical properties of the other ingredients matter much more. The cocoa butter has to be deodorized, or else your chips will have a distracting floral undertone that doesn't marry well with the peanut flavor. The peanut flour has to be unsweetened and unsalted or there's no reliable way to get consistent results. The salt is just my personal preference, but it is the best for baking. Buy some.

You cannot replace the cocoa butter with another fat. Butter doesn't work, clarified or otherwise. Coconut oil doesn't work either, in any of its various forms. Palm kernel oil could work, but I don't use it because its production contributes to deforestation.

I've added amazon links directly to the products I used to test this recipe, so you won't have to hunt down these specialty components. Those are affiliate links, so buying through them also helps support my baking and recipe development endeavors.

Ingredients

• 4.2 oz Deodorized Cocoa Butter
• 5.6 oz grams Unsweetened Unsalted Peanut Flour
• 5 oz Confectioner's Sugar
• 1 tsp Vanilla Extract
• 1 tsp Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt

Directions

1. Add the cocoa butter to a large microwave-safe bowl and microwave in 30 second intervals until the cocoa butter has liquefied. Stir in the vanilla and salt.
2. Add the peanut flour to the melted cocoa butter and stir with a wooden spoon or flexible spatula. When peanut flour is added to large quantities of liquid, it tends to form lumps. That's fine, the lumps will disappear in the next step. If this bothers you, you can add the cocoa butter to the peanut flour 1-2 tablespoons at a time, mixing as well as you can between additions. This method will start out crumbly and slowly thin into a suspension resembling extremely thin soupy peanut butter.
3. Add all of the confectioner's sugar to the bowl and continue stirring carefully to incorporate. At first it will seem like too much powdered sugar, but it will all combine. Depending on the accuracy of your scale, you may need to mix this a bit with your hands to make sure everything is evenly distributed. Keep kneading and mixing until you can't see any streaks of powdered sugar or lumps of peanut flour.
4. Spread this mix into a layer on a piece of parchment, silicone mat, or place in a gallon-size plastic zip-top bag and flatten. Leave this at room temperature for an hour or two until it has hardened, then break or cut into pieces of your desired size. You can speed up the hardening by popping it in the fridge or freezer.
5. You can store the unbroken slab or your finished morsels in an airtight container at room temperature, though if your kitchen tends to run warm, consider storing them in the fridge just to be safe.