Amish Mud Hen Bars Recipe: Rich Chocolate-Peanut Butter Dessert Bars

By Kevin Williams

When Gloria Yoder, known as The Amish Cook, first shared her recipe for “Mud Hen Bars” I was intrigued. I recently tried this recipe with my daughters, Aster and Bea. Aster is content helping in the kitchen, while Bea prefers to dump and stir a few things and then move on, so complex baking projects can be a challenge when they’re around. If you make these bars on your own or in a kid-free kitchen, they will turn out much neater. The photos here don’t fully capture how good they are. I never asked Gloria why she calls them “mud hen bars” — a mud hen doesn’t sound very elegant, and perhaps the bar wasn’t meant to be a beauty contest winner. (As a side note, the Toledo minor league baseball team is called the Mud Hens.)

What sets these bars apart is the brown sugar and egg white topping that bakes into a slightly crunchy, sweet shell over the filling. The contrast of textures — a tender base with gooey marshmallows and chocolate, finished with a crisp brown-sugar meringue — is wonderful. These are delicious and worth making even if they don’t look like magazine-perfect bars.

Mud hen bars in the pan…the marshmallows puff up while baking

Again, I know these bars won’t win a beauty contest, but they ARE amazingly good!

Give them a try — baking and eating these is highly recommended.