Sweet and salty haystacks...

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I was telling Jeff the other week about a no-bake "cookie" that my Mom used to make when us kids were growing up - I think they were called haystacks. They were basically those crunchy chow mein noodles mixed with plenty of melted chocolate, butterscotch chips, sometimes peanut butter and I think there might have been some sort of nut thrown in there, but it's been forever since I've had them. I couldn't get them out of my mind and figured we'd give them a try, but with a bit of a makeover and we ended up with these Chocolate and Peanut Butter Pretzel Haystacks.

To retain the crunch and bulk of the chow mein noodles, without actually using them, a combination of whole-grain puffed cereal (bulk) and broken pretzels (crunch) (sticks or twists work best) were tossed together, along with shredded coconut for sweetness and chopped toasted almonds. Since I was looking to play around with the flavorings, once that mishmash of ingredients was merged, we divided them evenly between two bowls.

For the first set, we melted about a cups worth of chopped bittersweet chocolate, then stirred in natural almond butter (homemade!) and zapped it for a few more seconds in the microwave to meld the two together. The chocolate mixture was smooth and pourable, which made it a breeze to mix in with the puffed cereal concoction. Two tablespoons worked well to divvy the mixture out onto a baking sheet if you want to keep your hands clean, but I ended up using one spoon after the first two or three - a little messier, yes, but then I got to lick my chocolate-y fingers clean when I was done!

For the next batch, I went the peanut butter route, using peanut butter chips and natural peanut butter. These chips don't tend to melt as nicely as chopped chocolate, but as soon as we added the peanut butter and gave it another jolt of heat, I found the added fat from the nut butter helped smooth it out. It was a bit stiffer than the chocolate version and I found I had to work a little harder to get all the cereal and pretzels coated with it, but it worked together in the end. If you want to up the peanut quotient, you could swap out the almonds in the dry ingredients of this combo for chopped peanuts, but I didn't think that far ahead. I imagine butterscotch chips would work just as well as the peanut butter chips here, using either the almond or peanut butter.

To firm up the cookies, a quick rest in the refrigerator did the trick - I found the coating stayed set at a cool room temperature, but if your kitchen runs especially warm, you may want to keep these in the refrigerator or even the freezer. Both of us were wondering how the coconut would end up working in these - happily, we found it added more of a textural chew with a very subtle coconut note. If you would like the coconut to be more pronounced, you could try toasting the shreds first. I quite liked both versions, but found myself reaching for the peanut butter mounds while Jeff ran towards the chocolate/almond (no surprise there!). Both of us, however, loved the war between the sweet and salty notes in these, a top flavor contrast for us!

Recipes
Chocolate and Peanut Butter Pretzel Haystacks