It’s been awhile. That’s kind of the theme for this place, not that anyone is really paying attention. In the end I like having this as a record of my baking/cooking and traveling adventures and to look back on for recipes that have worked (don’t usually publish things that don’t work because why keep that). The other night I decided to try my hand at some brownies. Aside from cookies and banana bread, I don’t do much in the way of sweets baking. D isn’t a huge cake person so haven’t really had a desire to do that. I am not opposed to pies though just haven’t got around to attempting anything. So brownies it was. I looked up a few different recipes and of course looked to Ina Garten since she has some good recipes (especially booze ones). I then kind of modified it to my own. D wanted to incorporate some peanut butter into it. I was initially going to do a PB swirl type thing but then elected to just use the peanut butter chips I had.
Ingredients
- 1/2 cup (1 stick) of unsalted butter
- 3.5 ounce dark chocolate (had a bar of some random Russian chocolate)
- 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
- 1/2 cup peanut butter chips
- 1 1/4 cups sugar
- 1/2 tsp salt
- 2 tsp vanilla
- 3 eggs
- ~1 Tbsp cocoa powder
- 1 1/4 AP flour
- 1 packet (~ 1 Tbsp?) of instant coffee
Directions
- Using a bain marie (I did a makeshift one with a small pot with simmering water and a metal bowl on top), I melted the chocolate and the dark chocolate bar.
- I then mixed in the cocoa powder (probably could have added more as the final product didn’t come out as chocolatey as I was hoping).
- In a separate bowl, mix together the sugar, vanilla, eggs and instant coffee
- In 3rd bowl, mix the flour, salt, baking powder
- After letting the chocolate mixture cool some, mix into the sugar/vanilla/egg mixture.
- Coat some peanut butter and chocolate chips in flour
- Fold in the flour mixture to the wet mixture from step #5. Then add in the chips.
- Poured the final mixture onto parchment paper in a 8 by 8 pyrex pan
- Baked at 350 F for about 30-35 minutes (until a toothpick came out clean)
- Let sit on rack for 30 minutes and wait until cooled to cut.



Overall it came out pretty good. A bit more cake like than fudge like. As stated above, could use more cocoa powder. Overall a pretty simple recipe.
-StewsCat