Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies

Just like a great Chocolate Chip cookie recipe, every household needs fantastic brownie recipes. Since the weekend was approaching and my kids only get dessert on those days, I like to find something that they truly enjoy and brownies are one of those things. I've made countless brownie recipes over the years; anything made-from-scratch to store bought boxed mixes. While most of them were edible, none of them blew us away.

Since I started this blog I keep getting requests from the kids about things to make. Brownies was one of them. I figured I'll have to kiss a few frogs try a few recipes until I find "the one". I had just gone to the store so one of the requirements had to be that I had everything on hand for the recipe since I didn't want to run out again. Dorie Greenspan had some mouthwatering recipes in her book that I will try in the future but all of them seemed more time and ingredient consuming than I was willing to put in this time. Finally I stopped at one of Martha Stewart's recipes: Peanut Butter Swirl Brownies.

A quick read through the recipe and I knew I had everything on hand for them plus the brownies didn't seem too involved either which was perfect. The recipe is straight forward; Chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar, and a little flour. The longest part of this recipe is to melt the chocolate and butter over a double boiler. The rest is put together quickly. The peanut butter swirl mix is combined by hand and then dropped in little dollops on top of the brownie batter in two additions, then swirled with a knife before baking.

These brownies were great! They were cakey, but also fudgey. The chocolate part wasn't cloyingly sweet and the peanut butter swirl gave a nice contrast with a little saltiness. We really enjoyed these brownies, especially with a scoop of homemade vanilla ice cream (this recipe will be featured soon).

 I will most definitely add this brownie to my recipe file for future desserts. As far as this being "the one" ? I'm not sure yet, I guess you'll have to stayed tuned for future brownie adventures.

You can find the recipe in Martha Stewart's book: Martha Stewart's cookies which has a ton of fantastic recipes, or in the case of this brownie you can find it on Martha Stewart's Website as well.