Amazing Peanut Butter Brownies Recipe

[0:00]Hey, I'm John Canell, and today on Preppy Kitchen, we're making peanut butter brownies. So let's get started. To make this delicious recipe, you'll need butter, chocolate chips, granulated sugar, light brown sugar, cocoa powder, salt, all-purpose flour, eggs, vanilla, and of course, peanut butter. First off, I lined an 8x8-inch pan with parchment paper, and I set my oven to 350, so it's nice and warm when we're ready. Get this all side. A little bit more side. First off, I'm adding one cup or 226 grams of butter into a small pot. And if you wanted to, you could do this in your microwave in a big bowl, but, oh my gosh, the chance of butter explosion is high, so I like doing this in a pot. There's also something that sparks joy about seeing butter bubbling in a pot, it's like very, very much my happy place. Right, this is going to go over like medium, medium low heat and we're going to get it all nice and melty. There we go. While that butter is melting, I'm going to measure out half a cup of semi-sweet chocolate chips. You could use any chocolate that you really love, by the way. This is going to go right into the butter as soon as it's ready. And, oh my gosh, these brownies are the best. I love chocolate and peanut butter together, and the combination in these is just like fudgy, amazing deliciousness. They're like very indulgent. This is ready. Give your chocolate, give your butter a stir as needed. You're going to swirl it around in the pan. It's almost ready. Okay, my butter is nice and melty, it smells delicious. One half a cup of chocolate chips. Ooh, right in there. Don't spill. And we're going to whisk this until they're all nice and melted, it should happen pretty quickly. This is just getting us started with the chocolate. We have more chocolate chips coming in later as well as the cocoa powder. Mmm, this smells so good. It's like a delicious ganache chocolate soup situation. It's all melted in, you can see it's really thin. I want this to cool down just a bit, so my eggs don't cook. So, I'm going to pour this into a big bowl. Ooh, that's amazing. This gets set aside for just a few minutes while we deal with the dry ingredients. Into a separate bowl, I'm sifting in one and a quarter cups of all-purpose flour, that's 150 grams. Ooh. That was way too much. Brownies really don't need that much flour. It's almost like when you make a cheesecake, you add a little bit of flour just to stabilize things. You want the bare minimum of flour in a brownie to hold all that fudgy deliciousness together. That's why I use a scale. Using a scale gives you really accurate results, and you're not going to pack a ton of flour into your measuring cup, which happens when you scoop it. Zero it out. And I also want half a cup or 50 grams of cocoa powder. This is the reason why we're sifting it. Cocoa powder can be really lumpy. Sift, sift, sift. This cocoa powder isn't that lumpy and look at that. Tons of rocks. Why did I do that? Every time I try and be slick, something bad happens. I also want a teaspoon of salt, but I'm telling you, it's a teaspoon of kosher salt, big relatively big granules of salt in here. Add this in afterwards because it wouldn't go through the sifter. If you're using table salt or fine salt, you really want to use probably half a teaspoon because you get a lot more salt in each measuring spoon depending on how big or small the crystals are. Give this a whisk. Clean up your mess if you tried to show off and got cocoa powder all over the counter. That never happened. Okay. Dry ingredients are all done. Now we're going to go back to our wet ingredients, which have had a second to cool down a bit. Right now I want to add one cup of granulated sugar, that's 200 grams. By the way, Locklin and George love this recipe. If you love brownies and most of us who are chocolate lovers do, you are going to die for peanut butter brownies. Oh my gosh. The saltiness and the creaminess of the peanut butter with the fudgy brownie is amazing. I want one cup of firmly packed brown sugar. Uh, I'm not packing it though, so I'm measuring it, it's 220 grams. And I'll actually sprinkle it in because when you pack things into a measuring cup, just plops out in one big mass, and you end up with little boulders of sugar that are kind of annoying, so, I like to just sprinkle it in and break up all the little sugar rocks. Just got to keep track of the number. If you don't have brown sugar, by the way, you can definitely make it with sugar and molasses, and if you don't have molasses, you're going to just use regular sugar, honestly. The brown sugar adds a little bit more depth of flavor, but you could do all granulated if you need. And for a brownie where, you know, it's baking in a baking tin, it is so low stress. You can go ahead and play with the ingredients a bit and make it your own recipe. My mom loves to do that. She'll like slash ingredients out, add more of others, and it'll come out, it'll be delicious. Okay, three eggs right into here. And the last thing we're going to do is add in one tablespoon, 15 ml of vanilla extract. There you go. This gets whisked up until it is nice and smooth. And you can go ahead and use an electric beater if you really want to. If you want that beautiful brownie top that has that kind of crackly finish. You're not really going to see it because of the peanut butter in this, but if you want that, you want to mix, mix, mix, mix your wet ingredients up to help really incorporate the eggs and dissolve the sugars. And this smells amazing. So good. You can let me know in the comments if there's a chocolate recipe or peanut butter recipe you really want to see on the channel. Look at that consistency. It is silky, chocolaty and amazing. I could definitely see some people adding some like chopped uh toasted peanuts to this for a little bit of crunchy, creamy deliciousness, but totally up to you. You let me know if you have anything that you think would be really delicious in this. I could even see some people like adding uh marshmallows into it. All right, so now we're going to fold things in together. You never want to overwork your batter for something that's like not a bread. So all the other baked goods, like brownies, muffins, cakes, you're adding the flour in and mixing it until it is just combined. You don't want to activate the gluten here. So I'm going to gently fold things together. And once I see almost no streaks, I'll stop. If you're wondering where the peanut butter comes in, it comes in at the very last step. We're going to make it look beautiful as well as delicious. Okay, come take a look at this. This is so amazing. It's almost no streaks. And that means I'm going to stop, even though it's not completely mixed, because I'm adding one half of a cup of chocolate chips to this. These are going to melt inside and just have like really delicious gooey moments. So, fold those in and just to distribute them. And as you do that, you'll finish mixing in the batter. A lot of times in my recipes, you'll see mix until almost combined, and that means there's one more step and in doing that step we'll finish mixing. A lot of times people think that like, oh, I'm a bad baker or whatever, and it's really something simple like over mixing the batter. It can get you and change everything. So, I lined an 8x8 inch baking tin with parchment paper. Just like that, it'll come out really easily. I'm going to clip this paper right to the edge before I add my batter in. These little clips come in handy whenever you're using parchment paper. It just holds everything in place and you get a better edge. Now, let's pour our batter in. It sets up really quick because there's a lot of butter in there. But butter makes everything better. I'm desperately trying to not eat all this batter raw, it smells so good. We're going to smooth it out all the way to the edge. It would level a bit in the oven, but we're going to add our peanut butter in now. Don't think I forgot about that. Half a cup of peanut butter, we're going to add like teaspoonfuls to the batter and just space them out. If you've ever done any kind of marble cake before, it's a similar deal. You're going to like give them some space in between. And no matter how you do it, it's going to be delicious, but it's nice if it looks pretty too. For this recipe, I'm using a creamy peanut butter, and it's like Jiff, basically. If you want to use like, this is like Laura scooter or something like that, where you have to like really mix it up and the oil separates out, that'll work too, but it has to be super well mixed. And this peanut butter is like the perfect consistency for swirling. A lot of the natural peanut butter can be a little bit too thick or some maybe too grainy, blah, blah, blah, blah, so it'll work, but you might have to work at it a bit more. I have my little spatula, you could use a knife too. I'm just going to swirl this in. And this will bake up and even out. So don't worry if it doesn't look perfect or there's like big lumps, but we're just going to swirl it in and create some visual interest as well as spreading the peanut butter out and in to the brownies. This is going into the oven, 350 for 40 to 45 minutes or until the center doesn't really jiggle when you give it a little jiggle. Here you go. My brownie's out of the oven, the clips come off, and I want to show you how easy this is to get out of the pan when you use parchment paper. Perfectly clean. Amazing. Now we're just going to take the paper off. Give it a cut and sink our teeth into this fudgy amazingness. Mmm. Ah, do you see this? Fudgy, peanut buttery, amazing. That is like criminally delicious. Oh my gosh. It's like too good to be true good, and the peanut butter and the chocolate just like melts in an amazing like, oh, so good. I hope you get a chance to try this recipe, and if you like this video, check out my dessert bar playlist.