Peanut Butter Squares

I spent literally the entire day on Sunday preparing for a dinner for some friends. I made black olive rye bread. Tuna meatballs on a Tuscan tomato sauce bed with steamed basmati rice. I made a warm courgette and spinach salad. I made chocolate truffles.  I've blogged about my chocolate truffles before. I make them with the darkest chocolate, lots of espresso powder and honey. It should only take about 10 minutes to make them once the chocolate, coffee and honey mixture semi-sets in the fridge, but in reality the drizzling of the honey into the viscous chocolate and coffee mix is so damn mesmerising I can let half an hour go by just watching it drip off the end of a teaspoon. But this is a dinner party and I need to concentrate. Besides, I am also making my raspberry and almond frangipane tart, complete with homemade sweetcrust pastry, a lemon creme pat, frangipane paste and a whipped cream topping with raspberry and kirsch drizzled over the top, which takes hours and hours to put together. I love, love, love cooking for dinners so no hardship at all to spend pretty much the entire day in a kitchen - all those half hours waiting for dough to prove and truffle mix to set are after all perfect opportunities to paint my nails, drink tea, read the papers and stare contemplatively out of the window at my beautifully emerging Winter garden, which has just been pruned to within an inch of its life, and is feeding greedily on the peat that has been dumped all over it. But this blog post is not about any of this fab food, though I should just close this part by confirming that it went down beautifully with my guests. One of those great moments where you imagine you are actually living one of those scenes at the end of Nigella Bites where she produces, seemingly effortlessly, dishes and dishes of beautiful looking food, floats into the kitchen dressed to the nines, chest standing to attention, and dishes up to her mates who clink their glasses, oblivious to the amazing luck that has blessed them with a friend like Nigella. So, a successful evening, but not the sum total of my baking efforts. Amazing that there was any time left after the scope of that menu. But what happened was that after producing all that grown up food, I was overtaken by a need to revisit my prepubescent years, and I scanned my accumulated book of recipes for inspiration. What would hit it more definitively than peanut butter squares? Made with leftover Speculoos paste, organic unsweetened peanut buter, and I am in the school of Digestive Biscuit base. You need the crunch to contrast with the sticky peanut butter. And my topping must be milk chocolate. Dark chocolate indicates an attempt to transform your peanut butter square into something serious, and serious is something a peanut butter square absolutely is not. It is about comfort, craving for childhood, it is all about reward. It takes an hour to set, and after I have cut the block up into squares, an hour to despatch. My house is full of kids at the moment, not all of them mine. I am lucky to get one, and I make it last over a cup of tea.