A Dream Product from Peanut Butter & Co.

How do you make yummy “homemade” chocolate-peanut-butter-oatmeal cookies with less than three minutes of effort?

It all started when I read about Dark Chocolate Dreams on the Web site Bite of the Best.

Dark Chocolate Dream is a rich melding of natural peanut butter and cocoa…not a side-by-side flavor production like Reese’s PBCups but rather a smooth, subtle, grown-up blend.

 Bite of the Best is a cool interactive Web site devoted to finding, sampling and spreading the word about tasty new food products. Webmaster Bonnie Tandy Leblang, a longtime friend and fellow food writer, is an authority on nutrition. Together with her two twenty-something sons, she writes Bite of the Best as three different perspectives on each product. (The Web site also includes product coupons and  contests.)

Back to the cookies.  Desperate to schmear my new-found Dark Chocolate Dreams on something, I baked a batch of break-apart refrigerated oatmeal cookie dough; let them cool for 10 minutes, then spread each with a tablespoon of Dreams.  The easy-to-spread product has a pronounced peanut and cocoa flavor, with none of the sugar-overload found in many flavored peanut butters. It’s smooth, but retains that slight (and satisfying) grittiness of natural peanut butter. 

 It would also be delicious swirled into softened frozen yogurt, baked into banana bread and bread pudding, and plopped on (and in between) a stack of hot pancakes.

 Dark Chocolate Dreams is the brainchild of Peanut Butter & Co., a New York City company that started out as a tiny sandwich shop near New York University and Washington Square. The product line has grown to 10 varieties of peanut butter including Smooth Operator, Bee’s Knees (with honey), White Chocolate Wonderful, and The Heat is On, which is spiced with cayenne,  chili powder and crushed red pepper. (I’m trying that one in a Thai-style grilled chicken salad later this week.)

You can find the product ($6 a jar) in some upscale supermarkets (I bought it at Bristol Farms in La Jolla), at the original sandwich shop, and on-line at I Love Peanut Butter.com.