Peanut Butter Squares

I've been working at the Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict summit all this week. My team and I have worked for months and months for this week, and turns out, it was worth all the effort. Hilary Clinton called this a "summit to end all summits".  Right, so no pressure then, for the organisers. But she was right - this was not a darkened room with Ministers round a table. This was noisy, colourful, swarming with people, installations, theatre, powerful pictures, painful testimony, mock trials of UN resolution 1325 (look it up)...somewhere in the middle of it, or to be more accurate, in discussion room 4, which was right at the back in a corner, I was chairing discussions on child soldiers, on women building peace, on..well I kind of lost track somewhere around the middle of day 2.  Friday afternoon it was over and the organising teams lay around, panting with exhaustion, eyes glazed, cheeks flushed with the sheer relief of having averted logistical disaster....it had been a good week. I headed home to write up a speech I was delivering in my local community on Saturday morning. My brain was still functioning on nervous adrenaline and I couldn't quite give up the ghost. The next day, I delivered the speech, tissues were out in the audience all over the place, plaudits all round afterwards, and I was finally at liberty to collapse. But, I've never really been that good at collapsing. I came home and considered my options. An afternoon of mindless TV. A 5 hour bath. Straight to bed to sleep off the week, no getting up again before Monday? I headed into the kitchen. Before taking up any, or all, of these options, I needed a celebration bake. And when I do a celebration bake, I get heavily into children's party food. Mini key lime pies, mini cheesecakes, fairy cakes with hundreds and thousands scattered randomly over them...I opted for chocolate peanut butter squares. If you google a recipe, you get about a hundred. Considering the ingredients for a chocolate peanut butter square are self evident and indisputable - chocolate, sugar, peanut butter, digestive biscuits and butter - it seems pretty extraordinary that there could be any debate about how to make them. But there is, and I've tried nearly all of them, out of sheer curiosity (and also because I have a baking obsession - nobody reasonable would spend whole weekends comparing chocolate peanut butter square recipes). I opt for the BBC Good Food recipe today, which uses dark chocolate instead of milk, smooth peanut butter instead of crunchy, and golden castor sugar instead of muscovado. I chuck the base into the food processor, melt the chocolate, pour one over the other in a square tin, throw it into the fridge, and 2 hours later, chop it up and pass it over to my teenage family for immediate consumption. Only then am I ready for that 5 hour bath.  Look, when you've spent all week campaigning to end sexual violence in war zones, making chocolate peanut butter squares is a humble and simple way to ease yourself back into the privilege of your safe, daily life.