Peanut Butter Brownies

I kicked off 2016 in the best way possible - by competing in a Great British Bake Off against my boyfriend and ending up with a kitchen full of delicious baked goodies. No room for salad leaves in my New Year's fridge I'm afraid! Luke decided to bake some simple (yet incredible) white-and-milk-chocolate cookies, where-as I thought I'd be a bit more adventurous and tried my hand at baking some peanut butter brownies. As it turned out, Luke won our bake-off, namely because I'm the only person in my family that actually likes peanut butter. Of course I forgot about that when choosing my bake and now have an entire batch of brownies to myself... not that I'm complaining. BUT it would appear that everyone on Twitter/Instagram liked the look of these, so I thought I'd pop up a post sharing the recipe (although I did stray from it a few times by accident.)

I found this recipe on BBC Good Food, which is my favourite foodie website. You can click straight onto there and follow the recipe listed if you like, or you can follow my recipe which is slightly different, namely because I got my measurements wrong! I'm also going to alter my recipe a little, as I used dark chocolate and feel like the brownies would taste WAY better if I used milk chocolate instead.

Ingredients ::

250g crunchy peanut butter.

200g milk chocolate.

280g light muscovado sugar.

3 medium-sized eggs.

100g self-raising flour.

:: Method ::

Step one. Set aside 25g of the peanut butter - you'll be using it later for the topping. Pre-heat your oven to 180c and line a your baking tray with baking parchment. Break up your chocolate into small pieces.

Step two. Gently melt the peanut butter, chunks of chocolate and the sugar together in a pan on a low heat. The recipe on Good Food says to occasionally stir the mixture, but I found that the ingredients melted together much easier if I stirred it a lot more. You want your mixture to become almost like a batter and for it to completely take on the colour of the chocolate. Once everything is combined, turn off the heat.

Step three. Once you've removed the pan from the heat, beat in the eggs one by one. I found it easiest to do this using a table spoon. After you've combined the eggs and the mixture together thoroughly, slowly add the flour and stir in.

Step four. Pour the mixture into your baking tray. Melt your reserved peanut butter - I found it easiest to put it in the microwave for one minute. Drizzle the melted peanut butter over the brownie mix, then pop it into the oven. I baked mine for about 35 minutes.

Step five. Once your brownies are ready, take them out of the oven. I left mine to cool for about 5 minutes in the pan, then I sliced them and moved them individually onto a baking rack to finish cooling completely. I got around 20 brownies out of my mix - but that might be because my precision when slicing is poor and they all ended up different sizes! On average I think you'd probably get about 16 decently sized brownies, or 24 bite-sized ones.

I feel like these brownies strike the balance between peanut butter and chocolate perfectly. Like I said, I used dark chocolate for mine, but I feel like they'd taste a lot better if I used milk chocolate - I suppose it depends on how much of a sweet tooth you have! I love the texture that the little bites of peanut give so would definitely recommend using crunchy peanut butter over smooth. I'd also like to mention that it doesn't really matter how expensive your chocolate/peanut butter is - I used the Asda own-brand stuff and they taste amazing!

If you have any recommendations for bakes for me to try please let me know. Luke and I are having a re-match next week and I'm dying to beat him!