The idea for these bagels spawned from reading a post on A Beautiful Mess, where Emma mentioned that her favorite bagel was from Panera – a peanut butter and banana bagel in fact! I never had the chance to try this gem, as it has been discontinued, but decided to take on this challenge of recreating what I imagine they would have been like. The execution of making these bagels however, poses the problem of  adding two wet ingredients to dough, which would just result is needing more flour. But I have made bagels using pumpkin puree in the past and therefore substituted with mashed banana and used PB2’s powdered peanut butter instead.

I had hoped for a very obvious flavor, but the result was more subtle and I may need to try folding in real peanut butter for a swirl or try peanut butter chips. Or maybe my desire for a super peanut buttery-banana-y bagel is unrealistic, and this is as close as it gets. Don’t get me wrong, these were wonderful bagels! I wouldn’t be sharing them on my blog if they were not, just not a “wow that’s an explosion of peanut butter-banana flavor”. That response might be reserved for moister items such as muffins and blondies. To compensate, these were particularly good with a smear of Dark Chocolate Dreams peanut butter. Peanut butter on top of peanut butter – that’s just how I roll!

Actually, I recently discovered that cake batter flavor exists, and upon searching their website while writing this post found both banana and peanut butter flavorings. I feel like it would be a cop out to use them instead of real banana and peanut butter, but maybe a couple drops would get this bagel flavor up to the next level. What are your thoughts?

Two years ago: Baked Blueberry Almond Pancakes