My baking bucket list...

The more my time is squeezed by the daily grind, the longer my baking bucket list grows, with tempting pictures and recipes everywhere I turn. There must be a version of Murphy's Law for cakes - the less time I have for baking, the more new recipes I find to try. I'm playing a game of catch-up, to try to squeeze in as many trials as I can before the preparations for Christmas baking start to take over. So here are some of the rather irresistible treats I want to make before things get all festive and I find myself immersed in a fog of cinnamon, nutmeg and mixed spice:

1. Peanut-Butter Crispy Bars. I've come across these in a few places over the last few months. If Millionaire Shortbread and Chocolate Krispie Bars got together and had little baby bars, this would be them. The tempting picture comes from the Smitten Kitchen blog - I'm immediately thinking, a much thicker layer of krispie and a shallower peanut-butter caramel layer... 
2. Peanut-Butter Crispy Roll. A slight cheat this one, as it's essenitally a version of No.1. Instead of careful layers and neat squares, everything is mushed together, then allowed to set in a tray before being rolled up like a Swiss Roll and sliced (sometimes with a thin layer of choc spread over it before rolling, which looks very pretty when sliced). My sister tasted this at a party recently and loved it.
3. Chocolate Oatmeal Peanut-Butter Bars (picture above courtesy of Bakingdom blog). If I'm honest, it was the look of the topping on this that got me and the idea of the three main components together, which sounds fabulous. I've yet to be convinced by the biscuit-type base, but I'm sure if I put my Baking Cap on, I can find a way to make this work. 
4. I've realised as I compile this list, that I have a serious peanut-butter addiction - the top three items on the list being a variation on the choc & pb theme. (Perhaps I should re-name the blog 'Tales from a girl who loves peanut butter' - I have been known to snack on Crunchy P-B straight from the jar.) But there is one item that I've been longing to make for ages now and I finally got round to finding a recipe - it's not chocolate or peanut-butter (amazingly enough). It's a very simple malted loaf.

To explain - I love Maltana (yes, the one that you buy in the supermarket, that is so incredibly more-ish that I have to ban it from my shopping trolley), but I wanted to find a non-yeast, quick version that was just as satisfying. This is partly because my sister (who loves Maltana as much as I do) currently has a ban on yeast and also because the yeast version is, naturally, more time-consuming. Delayed gratification? Not when it comes to me and malty-goodness. 

The recipe I found (on BBC Good Food - pictured above) appears for all the world to be a tea-brack that has been given an injection of malt (and of course, tea-brack is fabulously quick and easy to make). It comes with a 'good for you' tag, because of the lack of butter or other fat in the recipe, though the amount of sugar (of the refined and dried fruit variety) certainly makes up for that. I can't wait to see if this loaf can compare to a fabulous Maltana. I might just eschew the chocolate and peanut butter for a week or two and put this one to the top of the bucket list. Weekend baking here I come.