Peanut Butter Brownies

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It’s Saturday night in San Francisco, and while some of our friends are out pregaming before a Gold Room concert, I’m at home playing a board game. What I lack for competitive spirit on game nights I make up for in baked goods provided over the course of the evening. Sometimes I even score a come-from-behind victory by plotting my win while baking cookies. Shhh.

Tonight I’m pairing settlers of Catan with an improvised recipe for peanut butter brownies. I have yet to hear any complaints.

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I’ve been looking for a low-fuss peanut butter brownie recipe but none of the ones I’ve seen lately look quite right. So I pulled a basic brownie recipe from smitten kitchen and an old stuffed peanut butter cookie filling  recipe that I’ve had for a while (gotta make those again sometime).

Brownie Batter

I never have any baking chocolate on-hand. I always have cocoa powder. You can easily sub cocoa powder for baking chocolate by combining 3 tbsp cocoa powder and 1 tbsp oil (vegetable or an otherwise neutral oil) for every 1 oz of baking chocolate called for. Easy peasy. Take a moment to admire the cool-ass beads of chocolate oil that form on your cocoa mountain.

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This is a pretty straightforward one bowl recipe; just go down the list mixing in 1 ingredient after the next and stirring until just combined each time.

brownie-mix

For the flour I switched from whisk to spatula and folded it in gently (although brownie batter is pretty tough, so it doesn’t have to be handled as delicately as, say, biscuit dough). Pour it into a buttered pan and set aside. Side note: it’s going to be pretty thick, so it might not spread super easily.

Peanut Butter Topping

You know what sucks? Separated peanut butter. You know what sucks more? Costco-sized jars of separated peanut butter because oh my GOD you cannot recombine that stuff without getting awful peanut oil all over the sizes of the jar. Ugh. Now that we’ve dealt with that, the peanut butter topping is pretty simple. Mix up powdered sugar, butter, peanut butter and vanilla. Done.

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Layering your peanut butter and brownie mix isn’t rocket science. The only thing you need to remember is not to overmix, which would result in a bit too much homogeneity in your brownie treat. Just run a fork through your batter like you’re the hero in a Tolstoy novel,  plowing furrows in the hard Russian earth as you contemplate your own flawed human existence. Or whatever. Make patterns.

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They’ll make a bit more slowly than regular brownies, since they’re insulated under a nice peanut buttery blanket of goodness. These were in the oven for about 35 minutes, then they rested for about 10 minutes before I cut them.

Pro-tip for all: a humble plastic knife is the very best tool for cutting brownies cleanly. I didn’t use one today, but my friend Christina swears by it. She really should start a lifehacking blog, but she’s too busy in med school. You know, becoming a truly productive member of society instead of just an expert brownie hacker.

Check out these wayyy expert stab marks where I tested for doneness! It was my turn, I had to go roll the dice.

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Peanut Butter Brownie Recipe

Brownie base adapted from smitten kitchen’s favorite brownies

Brownie Batter
tbsp cocoa powder + 3 tbsp cocoa powder
1 stick (4 ounces or 115 grams) unsalted butter, plus extra for pan
1 1/3 cups (265 grams) granulated sugar
2 large eggs
1 teaspoon (5 ml) vanilla extract
1/4 teaspoon table salt (about 2 grams)
2/3 cup (85 grams) all-purpose flour

Peanut Butter Topping
2 tbsp butter, melted
1/3 cup powdered sugar
1/2 cup peanut butter (smooth is better, but chunky is ok)
1 tsp vanilla extract

1. Preheat oven to 350F and butter an 8×8 pan.
2. Mix cocoa powder, oil and butter in a large bowl. Add remaining brownie batter ingredients in succession, stirring to combine after each addition. Fold in flour until just combined. Pour into buttered pan.
3. In clean bowl, stir peanut butter mixture until blended. Spoon/pour over brownie batter.
4. Using a clean butter knife or toothpick, swirl peanut butter mixture until it covers the brownie batter, but not so much that they mix together too much.
5. Bake for 30-35 minutes, checking with toothpick for doneness (will come out clean) starting at 30 minutes. Let cool 10 minutes before munching.

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Black and White Not-So-Shortbread Cookies

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I absolutely love Brown-eyed Baker‘s Salted Chocolate Shortbread cookies. To death. So I decided to play around with them for my family’s Christmas dinner this year. Results were deliciously mixed. My mom can’t have regular chocolate, so I adapted the recipe to make a vanilla bean white chocolate version. I also upped the chocolate level of the original version by adding some semisweet chocolate to the mix.

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A note on dechocolating (un-chocolate-ifying?) the recipe: because cocoa powder is alkaline, simply omitting it can mess with the integrity of the recipe a bit more than you want to. I added an extra half teaspoon of baking powder to the mix to help compensate, although in the future I might do baking soda instead. Play around with it.

The Process

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These require a metric crapload of butter, which is the not-so-secret to delicious cookies. Here is my butter, softening.

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Cream together butter and sugars, and once creamy, add egg. Blend until combined. If you’re going the vanilla bean route, now is the time to slice open that magical bean and scrape out the delicious, wonderful caviar that is vanilla bean seeds. A quick how-to aside: use a paring knife to slit the bean open length-wise along one side, and fold open like a sticky little book.

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Use a spoon to scrape out some of the black gold. MMMMMMMMM. Save the bean husk (?), it still has plenty of flavor and can be used to make vanilla sugar, vanilla extract….or whatever madcap infusion of vanilla-infused edible you want to dream up. Put it in a bag of coffee beans, maybe? I’m just spitballing here.

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If you’re not going the vanilla route, simply press on to the flour-mixture step, where you have adequately fortified your flour mixture with a healthy dose of cocoa powder. Blend on, man.

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Last step for the chocoholics out there: fold in some roughly chopped chocolate chips. In baking, folding simply means dumping the enfolded ingredient into the dough, then using a spatula to scoop dough up and over the ingredient, until said ingredient has been roughly incorporated into the dough. Don’t over-do.

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With the inclusion of the egg, chilling is probably not entirely necessary, but I found that it helped a lot with preventing the dough from spreading too much during the baking process. So assemble your dough(s) into a log, and wrap tightly in wax paper.

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Let your giant cookie dough joints chill in the fridge for a while, then slice them up into a 1-inch discs immediately before baking. Note to future-self: Do not set cookie sheet on top of preheated oven while assembling cookie dough. They will not hold their shape at all. Not that I’m speaking from personal experience or anything. Cough cough.

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Sprinkle with sea salt for the chocolate ones, or drizzle with white chocolate for the vanilla bean ones. Or you know what? Drizzle chocolate on the chocolate ones and sea salt on the vanilla ones. The world is your chocolate oyster.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAThe Recipes

Chocolate Not-So-Shortbread Cookies

1¼ cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
½ teaspoon baking soda
1 stick plus 3 tablespoons (11 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup light brown sugar
¼ granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon fine sea salt, plus extra for sprinkling
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate, roughly chopped

Vanilla Bean Not-So-Shortbread Cookies

1¼ cups all-purpose flour
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 stick plus 3 tablespoons (11 tablespoons) unsalted butter, at room temperature
2/3 cup light brown sugar
¼ granulated sugar
¼ teaspoon fine sea salt
1/2 cup white chocolate chips, for drizzling
1 inch section of vanilla bean, scraped (or 1 tsp vanilla extract)

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