It doesn’t take much to make me happy. A good brownie, for instance. I could eat brownies all day long and be perfectly content. That said, boring brownies are for the birds. I like my brownies dressed up and ready to party. Whether filled, frosted, layered, or swirled, a brownie can be so much more than just a plain brown square. Like, for instance, a dense chocolate wedge swirled with sweet peanut butter filling, permeating all the cracks and crevices like a peanut butter earthquake. Indeed, these peanut butter swirl brownies are a sight to be seen. And promptly eaten.
A word of warning if you decide to be fancy and bake your brownies in a round cake pan – unless you can figure out how to line the sides of said pan with parchment as well as the bottom, they will be tough to remove. Or, should I say, remove in one piece. They wedge themselves into the pan like a kid at Disneyworld, and no amount of coercion will convince them to come out early. I got them out eventually though, kicking and screaming, otherwise these photos might have looked quite a bit different. As in, angry brownie splatters on the walls different.
I tried a slightly different brownie recipe than my usual this time, using a cocoa powder, vegetable oil, and boiling water base in place of my usual butter and melted chocolate. While I did love the texture (they’re pretty much spot on what you’d expect from a box brownie mix – both fudgy and chewy), I missed the rich flavor of the butter. Without the peanut butter swirl, I think these brownies may have been deemed a fail, as they were fairly flat and one-dimensional in flavor. Luckily, with these brownies it’s all about the peanut butter, so you wouldn’t really have known the difference if I hadn’t mentioned it. That said, feel free to substitute your own favorite brownie recipe in its place.
Total Time: 3 hours
