Peanut Swirl Brownies

Ina Garten bakes brownies to remind her husband of his college days.

Peanut Swirl Brownies When Jeffrey was in college, he has a big shoebox filled with homemade brownies. It's sort of the culinary equivalent of the low-cut dress. I guess it worked. I've been married to him for almost 40 years. So, I thought I’d make him brownies but this time with peanut butter swirl in them. The first I need is a pound of butter and a pound of chocolate. It's a lot of butter and chocolate but it's a lot of brownies. Then, now the chocolate chips, they’re semisweet chocolate chips. And then because I don’t want them too sweet, I'm going to put in six ounces of bitter chocolate. It's actually unsweetened chocolate. I'm just going to chop it up, keep your fingers out of the way. Okay, right into the butter and semisweet chocolate and just melt that until it just melts. You don’t want to burn the chocolate. Okay, I'm just going to stir this up and just over simmering water, if water boils it gets too hot and you’ll burn the chocolate. So, I'm just going to leave that over simmering water. I’ll get the eggs together. I need six eggs. I use extra large eggs. It's really important to use room temperature eggs. It just makes the batter work better. This makes 20 huge brownies. Jeffrey is really romantic. A few years ago for our anniversary, he gave me a box of brownies to remind me of the brownies that I use to send him in college. I thought it was so sweet. I wonder if he’ll get it, about all the things I'm going to cook for him today. Okay, the chocolate is just melted. I'm going to turn it off. Actually, I want to let it cool because I don’t want to pour the hot chocolate mixture right into the eggs. Okay, while that cools, I'm going to add some things to the eggs. I'm going to add three tablespoons of instant coffee powder. It sounds like an odd thing to put in brownies but it makes the chocolate taste so chocolatey, two tablespoons of good vanilla extract. Okay, next thing is two and a quarter cups of sugar. I'm going to whisk these together but I'm not going to whip it. I don’t want to get any air in it. I want them to stay pretty dense, all the coffee and vanilla, chocolate. Okay, next thing I'm going to do is put the flour and baking powder together. So I need a cup of flour, a tablespoon of baking powder and a teaspoon of kosher salt. I sift these together just to make it's really smooth when it goes into the mixture. Okay, so that’s the dry ingredients. Now I just want to see if the chocolate is cool enough so that it doesn’t scramble the eggs and since I'm putting chocolate chips in later, I don’t want it to melt the chocolate chips. Okay, I'm just going to pour it right to the eggs and coffee and vanilla. This is a big bowl of chocolate. Now the flour and baking powder, just slowly add it in. See, that’s not a lot of flour for that amount of batter. These brownies are so good. They’re really chocolatey. Okay, that’s mixed. So I'm going to take a quarter cup of flour and mix it with two cups of chocolate chips. What it does is keep the chocolate chips from sinking to the bottom of the batter. Just mix them together. Just put them right in. Sometimes I do these brownies with nuts. Sometimes I do them with salted peanuts are good, great flavor combination. Okay, buttered and floured a half sheet pan, we’re just going to pour these right on, just smooth it out. All right, take three quarters of a cup of peanut butter. You can use smooth peanut butter or chunky peanut butter, whatever you like and do big dollops of it right on top. Then I'm going to swirl it in with a knife, I’ll show you how. I think it's really important that actually when you bite into a brownie, you can taste the peanut butter. It doesn’t just look like peanut butter but it actually tastes like peanut butter. Okay, take a knife and just swirl this through. So every bite is going to have a little bit of peanut butter, a chocolate chip, chocolate and then all those flavors of coffee and vanilla. Who could resist that? Okay, these are going to bake 350 degrees for 30 minutes and then I developed this very strange technique but it works. Halfway through the baking, I'm going to pick up the pan and wrap it on the shelf and it releases all the air between the brownies and the pan. These are going to smell great. Brownies smells great. I'm surprised Jeffrey hasn’t come in to see what smells so good. They bake for exactly 30 minutes. I can see the swirl of peanut butter. That’s going to be perfect with a steak sandwich. These don’t look bad. I don’t know, a steak sandwich, brownies for lunch, Jeffrey might think I'm up to something. I hope he figures out what I'm doing. One brownie for him, if I leave all the brownies, he will eat them all. That’s not a good idea.