Peanut butter brownies… to welcome the holiday season…

 

I always get excited during October. Festive season. All the shopping. Happy moods all over.

After all, it is the closest to being our holiday season, something equivalent to the Christmas-New Year holidays. Everyone is in a celebratory mood right from Navratri to Diwali, so much so that , on some days there is no one in the entire wing in the office buildings. Its just contagious, this happy happy mood… and I love this mood.

So while the husband is planning to open up his 21-yr old Jack Daniels whiskey (gifted by a work colleague to him, comes in a super-sexy bottle which has all my attention – to serve as a home to one of my indoor plants :-)), I decided to bake something.

A lunch plan with a couple of friends at Prego is on the cards for tomorrow , (that is, if this whole Telangana bandh doesn’t spoil everyone’s plans!!! :-( ). Another reason to bake.

Some rummaging in my OneNote notebook in the Must-Trys section showed me some links for brownies. Something with peanut butter is what I wanted make for a while now. I clubbed both the words and Googled a bit, for some peanut butter brownie recipes. Instead of being swarmed with recipes, surprisingly I got just a couple. I mixed and matched them, and arrived at this recipe.

Ingredients

1/2 C peanut butter
1/3 C butter
1/2 C packed brown sugar
2/3 C sugar
4 tbsps thick cream (I used Amul cream)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 C flour (all-purpose)
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/3 C chocolate chips

Procedure

Beat the peanut butter and butter together with a fork for atleast 3 minutes till they both are blended well, and are smooth. Add the sugars to this and beat again, till the whole mixture is smooth.

Now add the cream and mix into the butter mixture. At the end, add the vanilla extract.

Now add the sifted flour, baking powder and salt mixture into this wet ingredient mix, and mix just enough.

Fold in the chocolate chips, and bake it in a preheated oven at 185 C for 25 minutes or when it passes the toothpick test. (Prescribed baking time is 35 minutes)

This batch yielded 20 pieces of brownies.

I took them out of the oven 10 mins before the prescribed baking time to let them be goo-ey and fudgy at the centre, and cut them after they cooled down. And man… what god-awesome they tasted! :-) With a rich peanut butter taste, and the crunch from the sugars, and the slight chocolate-y taste in them, I loved these brownies.

They had the almost-flaky finish on top, little dry in the next layer and gooey at the bottom, texture being just perfect.

After the Pound cake of this week and this brownie experiment, looks like I am on a self-claimed roll… This sure is a good baking week… :)