Peanut Butter Brownies

Peanut butter and Brownies. Peanut butter brownies. Everything about this sounds right doesn’t it! Two of my favourite things combined in one delicious scrumptious pudding (or Sunday afternoon snack like I had them).

So when chilling out on the couch one weekend with nothing much to do and in definite need of some comfort food, I thought I might try my hand at creating my own peanut butter brownies. After all, with the new house comes a new domestic goddess me (yeh right!). So I donned my polka-dot apron, searched through the cupboards for the ingredients and tottered about the kitchen in my Betty Draper-esque way.

The best thing about this recipe is it’s super easy! And you probably have most of the ingredients already in the house. It takes about 15 minutes to prep and 20-25 minutes to bake…so for you fellow novice bakers, this one will impress!

Here’s the ingredients list:

220g crunchy peanut butter (about 2/3 of your average jar)
100g bar of dark chocolate
100g bar of milk chocolate
250g soft light brown sugar (alternatively you can use sweetener like me!)
3 medium eggs
100g self-raising flour

You just need a large pyrex mixing bowl, pan of simmering water, whisk, baking tin and baking parchment (or grease-proof paper).

Heat your oven to 180 (a little lower for fan-assisted ovens). Then prepare your baking tin. You can do these brownies in a square tray (approx 20cm in size for the amount of mixture this makes), but I decided to make mine in a round cake tin. There’s no scientific trick to lining a round tin with baking parchment – I just cut a large enough square, then made slits from outside in to create a circular base and moulded it around the tin (then you can trim the edges and excess paper).

Onto the brownies…Start by placing a pyrex bowl over a pan of simmering water (make sure the water doesn’t touch the bottom of the bowl). Break most of the chocolate into pieces and place in the bowl along with the peanut butter, to melt slowly. Keep a few chunks of chocolate back for later. Mix constantly as the chocolate and peanut butter melts.

If you’re going for the sugar option, also melt this into the bowl with the chocolate and peanut butter. In honesty, this way does taste better and gives a slightly gooey-er version but if you’re trying to be just a bit well behaved like me, then sweetener is a good alternative. A few tablespoons of this just needs to be mixed into the melted mixture as it doesn’t take as long to dissolve.

Take the bowl off the heat. Then you need to beat the eggs into the mixture one by one.

Next you just sitr in the flour until there’s no white bits left in the bowl. Then scrape the mixture into your tin, nice and evenly and smooth out the top.

Now I like my brownies with a bit of texture, so grab those chocolate chunks you kept aside (I just kept the milk chocolate ones for this bit) and push them into the brownie mixture, spacing out so everyone gets a nice melted chunk! If you’re a peanut butter fiend like me, you might also like to put a few dollops of peanut butter around the top of the mixture so this melts in and creates a oozey peanut-buttery topping :-).

Then you’re ready to pop the tin into the oven and it only takes about 20-25 minutes to cook through. When it’s done, you’re looking for it to have a a crust on the top and to feel spongey and a bit uncooked when you gently push down on the middle.

Leave your brownies to stand and cool for as long as you like and then cut into pieces to serve. You can have these still warm with vanilla ice-cream or cool, munched on their own with a glass of milk (which was how I enjoyed them). Yum!

Now don’t hate me, but I left mine to cool for a few hours and in my haste to gobble them all up, I completely forgot to take a photo of the finished product cut all nicely into chunks…oops *blushes*

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