When I first read the recipe for these multi-layered chocolate peanut-butter crispy bars over on the Smitten Kitchen blog, my first response muttered over my keyboard was Damn…Damn. Dayum.

So I’ve renamed these the Dayum Bars and they are destined for my company’s annual bakesale tomorrow. It’s a simple yet swoon-worthy dessert that I can take no credit for, as Nick was really at the helm guiding these bars to existence — heating the water, sugar, and corn syrup to a candied state and melting chocolate and peanut butter together — while I was baking cookies (peanut butter-chocolate chip-oatmeal cookies!) for a birthday party.

A whole afternoon spent baking is a pretty fantastic thing, especially when it involves sampling various kinds of peanut butter and chocolate at all different stages of meltiness. Again, re: previous post, life is hard.

How we deviated from the recipe: by using two kinds of rice crispies (one generic and one fancy mix with a rounder shape and darker toasted color) and two kinds of peanut butter, then tweaking the chocolate-peanut-butter layer to taste and adding more chocolate until we reached the perfect combination.

The feedback so far on these bars is that they taste like Reese’s peanut butter cups with a crispy bottom, but I say Reese’s wishes they’d had the foresight to come up with this. My take? They are incredible at any state — slightly chilled and straight from the refrigerator, or sticky, gooey, and melting a bit after sitting out on the counter.

To all the chocolate-peanut butter lovers out there: good golly, proceed with caution.