Insert Food Bribe Here (Salty Chocolaty Peanut Buttery Crunchy Bars)

When I need to bribe someone or wow a crowd I default to Smitten Kitchen's Coffee Toffee recipe; which is one of the recipes that earned me the "Dessert Goddess" title in certain circles and resulted in me being automatically assigned desserts in a lot of potluck situations. My bar for what qualifies as top tier is extremely high. Salty Chocolaty Peanut Buttery Crunchy Bars are Alton Brown's favorite listed food bribe for people, the question was, how would they stack up for me?
In battle Peanut Butter Bars vs Coffee Toffee the bars lose on total effort to make because the toffee is simpler for me to make. They sugar/honey mixture the base is made out of gets heated to a candy temperature that slightly above a phase known as "soft crack" in candy making terms, but slightly below "hard crack"* in order to create a firm but still chewy texture. The several hundred degree mixture is then swirled with peanut butter.

I Swear Those Were Straight Lines When Cut

The bars require two cooling phases that up the manufacturing time, and are complicated to cut. The first cut is deceptively simple, and done while the peanut butter mix is still warm. However because it's warm the shapes shift as it cools; resulting in uneven lines. A chocolate toppings gets poured over the cooled peanut butter bars and you can sort of see the lines of the original cuts through it. The second cut is the hard one, now you need to slice along the original lines that have shifted during cool down. In retrospect, I should have flipped the entire thing over for cut number two, so that I could really see the lines that were apparent on the bottom. Even flipping it isn't a perfect solution though, because when I tried that on some of the pieces I discovered the chocolate layer was more likely to fracture when being cut from that direction.

Rough Edged But Tasty

It's the taste test that really matters though. My own personal opinion is while this is really good stuff, it's not top tier addictive. Mileage may vary if you love chewy peanut brittle more than me.

Difficulty Level: Complex

Will It Get Made Again? I'd only repeat this one on request from someone who loves it more than me. This batch will disappear without issue, but in the overall battle it loses to my favorite toffee in the candy bribe war.

*These are just literal descriptors of how sugar behaves at certain temperatures; some good candy thermometers include the descriptions along with the temperature marks.