I love making a whole batch of brownies for no particular occasion. After they’ve cooled, I cut them up and store them in the freezer. Then I take one out and let it defrost anytime I’ve got a brownie craving. They taste fresh for quite a while (not that they every really last that long anyway).
This time, I was looking for something a little more adventuresome than the plain ‘ol brownie, and the addition of nuts wasn’t going to cut it. So, I took my favorite plain brownie recipe from Cooks Illustrated and combined it with a Good Housekeeping recipe for peanut butter brownies. If you are feeling more like a traditional brownie, you can use just the recipe for the chocolate brownies below and shorten the baking time by about 10 minutes.
These decadent bars turned out quite amazing, I must admit! When researching recipes, I read a lot of reviews about various peanut butter swirl recipes not having enough peanut butter flavor. Well, this recipe has quite a lot of wonderful peanut butter flavor. They are chewy, moist, and thick, but not too cakey. However, they are a little crumbly… why do peanut butter baked goods always turn out crumbly? The only real problem with the crumbliness is that they don’t cut very neatly, even when cooled. Perhaps they would cut more cleanly if they were refrigerated first? So, in my opinion, if you aren’t planning on impressing anyone with the presentation of these brownies, the crumbliness does not outweigh fact that they are super duper tasty!
This recipe makes one 9 x 13 inch pan of fat brownies. (more…)