It’s a double post Sunday. This one will be more straight to the point and less funny. I’ll save my wittiness for the next post.

I will tell you one thing I am sick of … winter. It’s March. And apparently mother nature was taking the whole “in like a lion” thing seriously on Friday when what should have been a few inches of snow turned into over a foot of the heavy gross stuff. I woke up at 6 on Friday, took a shower, looked outside and realized getting to work was not happening. So this is how I spent an hour at 6:30 am — shoveling out my car and the front walk. I had to go out twice more and do it again. To make matters worse, even though there was no official snow emergency the classy people of Southie had their old tvs, lawn chairs, and traffic cones out saving spots — even ones they didn’t shovel out. Annoying.

 

Anyways, I was not in the mood to trek through the slushy mess Friday night to the bars. My friend Stacie texted me and said “I’m coming over. I’m bringing booze. Make me dessert.” So I emptied my baking cabinet and tried to think what I could whip up on the spot. I figure you can’t go wrong with the peanut butter and chocolate combination, so I decided to try some peanut butter brownies. Also, I only like brownie batter not cookie brownies so I figured there would be less of a risk of me eating these Saturday if they were in the house. I followed a recipe I found from http://www.browneyedbaker.com/.

Ingredients:

For the Brownies:

• 1¼ cups all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons dark unsweetened cocoa powder
• 11 ounces dark chocolate, coarsely chopped (I used semi-sweet)
• 1 cup (8 ounces) unsalted butter, cut into 1-inch pieces
• 1½ cups granulated sugar
• ½ cup packed light brown sugar
• 5 eggs, at room temperature
• 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

For the Peanut Butter Swirl:

• ½ cup (8 tablespoons) unsalted butter, melted
• 1 cup powdered sugar
• 1½ cups creamy peanut butter
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Step 1: Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease the bottom of a 9×13 baking dish with non-stick spray.

Step 2: Whisk the flour, salt, and cocoa powder together in one bowl.

Step 3: Melt the chocolate and butter in a saucepan over low heat stirring constantly until the chocolate and butter are completely melted and smooth. Reduce the heat to the lowest setting. Add in the sugars and whisk until completely incorporated, then remove from the heat. Let the mixture come to room temperature.

Step 4: Add 3 eggs to the chocolate mixture and whisk. Add the remaining eggs and whisk until combined. Add the vanilla and stir. Be careful not to overbeat the batter.  Thanks MOM for the new bottle of King Arthur Vanilla!

Step 5: Add the flour mixture to the chocolate mixture. Using a spatula (not the whisk) fold the flour mixture into the chocolate until it comes to together and just a little of the flour is still visible. Pour the batter into the baking dish.

Step 6: In a medium bowl, whisk together the peanut butter swirl ingredients. Using a spoon, place dollops of the peanut butter on top of the brownie batter. Using a butter knife, swirl the chocolate and peanut butter, running the knife crosswise and lengthwise through the batters. I ended up with too much peanut butter swirl so it didn’t swirl the way I wanted but it was still delicious.

 

Step 7: Bake for 40 minutes, until cooked through. I had to put mine in for another 15 minutes because the center was really goopy at first. Let the brownies cool completely (yeah, good luck with that).

These go great with a $5 bottle of wine, in case that’s also your style.

I will tell you that I appreciate my mixer a lot more after I had to use some elbow grease to make these with a wooden spoon like I was straight off the Mayflower. I started this bootcamp challenge at my gym this week, which had my arms feeling like jello by Friday night, so these brownies were not easy on the old biceps (or tripceps? or quadraceps? who knows.)

This is where I now have to spend 4 hours a week burning off all of these salted cookies.