Rich, fudgy peanut butter brownies with a layer of semisweet chocolate ganache

RECIPE (+1photo)

Serves: 18 brownies

Ingredients
1 sticks (1/4 pound) unsalted butter, softened
7/8 cups sugar
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1 large eggs
1 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
1 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 cups semisweet chocolate chips (9 ounces) [optional]

GANACHE
10 ounces bittersweet or semisweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup water
3/4 cup (1½ sticks) unsalted butter
*this amount is enough for a 2-layered cake, so you might want to 1/4 or 1/5 this recipe

1. Preheat oven to 350F/175C
2. Beat butter and sugar together till light and fluffy
3. Add peanut butter and beat till incoroporated
4. Beat in eggs and vanilla
5. Mix in flour
6. Mix in chocolate chips if desired, then pour mixture into a buttered breadloaf tin
7. Bake for about 40min till pick inserted comes out clean (it's ok if it feels a little soft)
8. Beat the ganache ingredients together and pour it over the cooled brownie. Leave the ganache to solidify (freezing speeds it up!) then cut the brownie into squares

(modified from original recipe here)


look how hard/baked the sides are. the brownie fell solidly out of the baking tin like a block!

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Another debilitatingly delicious dish created with Athena, with my kitchen partner & suitemate for this weekend. I do so love peanut butter, and if I get the right brownie slice, the texture of the brownie is oh so smooth.

Why do I say, the right slice? Because the brownie didn't actually turn out that well. It had a 1" depression in the center, and about 1cm in on all sides were hard-ish, like overbaked cookies. You can see those in the second photo. I'm not sure why it turned out like this...maybe it has to do with the egg yolk we left out, or that the butter wasn't soft enough so the brownie mixture wasn't very liquid.

Also, I'd probably leave out the choc chips (I used semisweet and white choc) the next time I make this recipe. There's enough choc with the ganache I feel, and I can save the chips for something else which really needs chips (like cookies!). It was a liiitle too sweet and rich. And sometimes all you could taste was the choc and not the peanut butter.

VERDICT: 8/10

Labels: BAKING

1 BITES