It’s been a while since I’ve made a dessert item for the Secret Menu. Since the Pseudo-Sundae last spring, actually.

That one was a big one, a real doozie. A dessert-for-supper-tonight kind of doozie. This one, not so much.

A lighter fare, the peanut butter and jelly twister is a new take on the classic PB&J. Often times if I’m not sure what I want—or even if I still am hungry—after I have finished a meal, I’ll make a bowl of cereal or a PB&J. In the past, I would make it on toast so that the peanut butter got all warm and gooey.

I posed a question to myself: what’s the opposite of that, of a warm peanut butter and jelly sandwich? How about a cold PB&J?

A cold sandwich would be boring since the jelly is already cold, so I had to think outside the bun, or bread. Whatever.

I chewed on the idea and my brain spit out a great idea: tossing the peanut butter and jelly into a cup with some granola and frozen yogurt and mixing it up.

It combines a number of my interests, namely satisfying my need to play with my food and play with new toys at the same time. I turned to the Vitamix mixer behind the ice cream server to stir it all up. There was also the opportunity to make a mess (I didn’t…), but the opportunity alone is sometimes enough for me.

If you want exact proportions for each of ingredients, here you go. There was one knife-side’s-worth of peanut butter (using the knife in the bucket as the tool of choice), as close to a spoonful of grape jelly as I could get and a dash of granola on top. I filled the remaining space in the cup with frozen yogurt.

It was more difficult to get everything to mix together evenly using the mixer, so I did have to spend 20-30 seconds making sure that all the ingredients were well-blended.

In my head, I pictured the product to be a little more colorful than it was. In reality, it just looked like ice cream that was a little darker in color than normal. The color of the jelly was swallowed up in the mixer.

The consitency was similar to that of a paste. A very peanut buttery paste.

The taste of the peanut butter took a front seat in this dish, even though the proportion of peanut butter to jelly was about equal.

It would have also been very boring were it not for the granola to add a cruncy variety in every spoonful.

This dish wasn’t large in size and didn’t sit heavy in the stomach—characteristics not shared by many other Secret Menu items over the years. However, as a dessert after lunch, it was perfect.

The peanut butter and jelly twister doesn’t require much in terms of preparation, and because of that, it is one of the most practical dishes that I’ve made.

Next time, I think I will make sure to add a little less peanut butter, a little more jelly and a lot more granola. I think that should keep the peanut butter more in check and give the texture more dimension.

This dish is something that I will surely make again. I liked it, and it was as easy to make as a regular PB&J.