Green & Black's Peanut Sticky Buns with Salted Butter Caramel Sauce

A couple of weeks ago, Tastespotting sent out a tweet on Twitter that said to contact them if interested in an opportunity that involved baking, blogging and chocolate. Those happen to be my three favorite things in the world aside from my kids.

I received a response a few days later asking for recipe ideas involving the new Green & Black's chocolate bar, Peanut. It is a milk chocolate bar containing caramelized peanuts and sea salt. I love Green & Black's chocolate. As many of you know, I eat exclusively organic food, including copious amounts of G & B chocolate. The ideas started coming. I sent a list of about 8 or more possible recipes to Sarah of Tastespotting and The Delicious Life, including these rolls. They picked four bloggers' submissions, and I was so lucky to be one of the four!

I had so much fun developing this recipe. I made it three times in five days, and unfortunately I ate almost all of them. True story: the day I was photographing the final batch, I looked down and saw that there were only five of twelve rolls left in the pan. I had eaten seven. SEVEN!!! They are just so damn tasty!!!

These are some of the most delicious, decadent things I have ever eaten. Really. They have everything: bread, crunch, chocolate, goo, caramel. Oh my. Oh. My.

The roll itself is not something I would call moist, but it is most certainly not dry. Soft. It is soft. It is ever so slightly sweet with a hint of vanilla. This is a roll that could stand on it's own - all too often I find that the bready part of a cinnamon roll/sticky bun is flavorless without all of its acoutrements. In this case, the roll is already so good, it is brought to a ridiculous level of deliciousness by its toppings and fillings. The Peanut bar is really quite something. I'm normally not a big fan of peanuts, but these are caramelized, so you get a wonderful sweet crunch every bite or so that is a lovely counterpart to the rest of the bun. The chocolate is rich and decadent but not overdone, and its sweetness is balanced by the barely sweet roll and the salty caramel sauce. Oh the caramel sauce. It is perfection. If I could eat it with a spoon I would. Oh, wait. I have been eating it with a spoon. It is smooth. So smooth. So creamy. The perfect balance of sweet and salty with a deep, dark caramel flavor.

Thank you so much to Sarah of Tastespotting for giving me the opportunity to create a fun and scrumptious recipe with a fantastic new chocolate bar. My recipe will be posted on the new Tastespotting blog. The blog launches next week, but there is no word yet on the order that the recipes created by myself and the other bloggers will be posted, so check back here for a link to the recipe.

*** UPDATE *** 3.23.10

The recipe is up!!! Here is the link. Enjoy!