Erin Mann is baking a new cake every week for a year from the "All Cakes Considered" cookbook and shares her adventures here on AnnArbor.com. Read past columns here.

I truly love peanut butter. It often works it’s way into my breakfast as a mix-in for oatmeal and makes a great midday snack slathered on a piece of bread or cracker of some sort. (I’ve even been known to eat it on corn chips. It sounds like an odd combination, but those that I’ve persuaded to try it like it, too.) And don't even get me started on the Chocolate Peanut Butter ice cream from Washtenaw Dairy!

Rex and I decided to combine efforts in the kitchen and make the Peanut Butter Fingers along with something for us to take to work for lunch the next day. He’d been itching to make another batch of rice balls, or onigiri, which is a Japanese comfort food. It is essentially a compressed ball of rice in a triangle or round shape with a savory filling and often coated in seaweed for easy handling.

We first heard of these handheld snacks in the Spilled Milk podcast which credits The Joy of Rice, part of the Oishinbo manga series, as its inspiration. We learned to make these tasty Japanese snacks from tutorials on the web about cooking Japanese rice and how to assemble rice balls. They are a great party food; we took them to a gathering earlier this summer and they were a big hit.

Mixing the batter for the Peanut Butter Fingers was a cinch. The recipe suggests using a 9 x 9-inch square baking pan, but we used an 8 x 8-inch pan. Either one will work; the smaller pan will just make your fingers slightly thicker. We greased our pan using the leftover wrapper from the stick of butter used in the batter.

As the Peanut Butter Fingers baked, we assembled our rice balls. After 25 minutes, the fingers did not quite test done and needed an extra couple minutes in the oven because we used a smaller pan.