Bittersweet Brownies with Salted Peanut Butter Frosting

I was planning on making a glorious-looking rhubarb meringue tart this week to compensate for the gaping chasm of radio silence since the last post, but this is Michigan after all, and there’s nary a stalk of rhubarb to be found this time of year, at least not in the groceries and farmer’s markets I scoured. So instead you get brownies (#SorryNotSorry).  Also, last month I packed up my life and moved, like, 10 whole miles down the road, so I feel like my new house and I have at least a semi-legitimate excuse for this lapse in posting (she bashfully excuses herself).

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Anyway. Today’s recipe was originally posted on TheKitchn as part of a Valentine’s Day series featuring a cookbook by Ashley Rodriguez called Date Night In. But personally, I think the chocolate-peanut butter combination is too good to be relegated to yearly pseudo-holidays, so I’m making it on May Day Eve.

As I skimmed this recipe’s ingredient list, it boded well from the outset by being pleasantly low on eggs and flour and promisingly high on butter, sugar, and chocolate. So I assembled the requisite ingredients and dove in. I liked this recipe for lots of reasons, one of the main ones being the fact that I had everything on hand before making it (espresso powder notwithstanding...but that's an optional ingredient so, you know). That hardly ever happens in this kitchen.

The steps for this recipe were simple and straightforward. After browning the butter and combining it with the chocolate, I just whisked, scooped, baked, and frosted. And once they were cool, of course I sampled.

Sidenote: As a new baker, I remember being intimidated by recipes that called for browned butter because it sounded like an ingredient that took finesse and expertise to produce. It is not. The Kitchn’s directions offer a nicely low-brow tutorial, and they don't even use the phrase “browned butter,” but instead jump right into describing the process used to achieve this ingredient (Can you put butter in a pan over medium heat? Can you wait patiently for 5-7 minutes? Can you tell the difference between the color yellow and the color brown? Then you can make browned butter).

Dry ingredients, sans espresso powder, ready to be sifted and incorporated at the proper juncture.  

Here is the mixing phase. About 20 stirs was all it took to sufficiently blend the wet and dry ingredients.

I used my ½ cup ice cream scoop (or is it meant to be a giant melon baller? I've never been entirely sure) to fill the jars, and then baked them for 30 minutes. Later, I would realize that I ought to have used more jars and filled them less, so the bake time would be lowered accordingly in that situation. The smaller portions would also have been better since both the brownies and the frosting are super rich. Tangent: We're reading Romeo and Juliet in the freshmen English class that I teach, and we just studied the scene where, in warning the young protagonists to love moderately and cautiously, Friar Lawrence observes, "The sweetest honey / Is loathsome in his own deliciousness / And in the taste confounds the appetite." He might as well have been talking about these suckers. Also Valentine's Day, love, tragedy, eating chocolate - it's all connected!

Freshly baked brownie babies. Quite large brownie babies, actually…

Not quite the same as cooling in a Heritage Hill, Victorian house window sill, but it’ll do.

Also, LOOK AT ALL THIS COUNTER SPACE, YOU GUYS. All the boxing and unboxing and [insert annoying details of moving here] was not for naught. Window sill trade-up was probably worth it. Probably.

Final Reflections: Doesn’t everything good in life always come down to proper proportions? Sigh. So, as I mentioned before, these guys rose more than I thought they would (even though I took the recipe’s note and added two eggs instead of three to prevent excessive airiness). But c’est la vie. Next time I would add less batter to each jar to leave plenty of room to put on a good half-inch of frosting on top without having it reach too far past the edge of the jar. I mean, I still put a half-inch of frosting on this batch, but I also ended up with some awkwardly tall pastry towers. Next time I’ll know better.

Bittersweet Brownies with Salted Peanut Butter Frosting

From Ashley Rodriguez's Date Night In

Makes 12 to 15 brownies or 9 brimful 4oz jars

For the Brownies:

3/4 cup (170 grams) unsalted butter, plus more for the pan
3 ounces (90 grams) bittersweet chocolate, chopped
1 1/2 cups (300 grams) granulated sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs - or use 3 if you like lighter, less dense brownies (read: if you're a dessert heretic)
3/4 teaspoon kosher salt
1/2 teaspoon instant espresso powder (optional)
1/2 cup (40 grams) cocoa powder
1/2 cup (70 grams) all-purpose flour

For the frosting:
6 tablespoons (85 grams) unsalted butter, at room temperature
3/4 cup (100 grams) smooth peanut butter
1/3 cup (40 grams) confectioners’ sugar
1/2 teaspoon flake salt

Directions

Preheat the oven to 325°F, and grease an 8-inch square pan (or 10-12 four ounce glass jars)

Line the pan with parchment paper so that a couple inches hang over the edge. Then grease the parchment (or spray the jars with non-stick cooking spray - I use Trader Joe's Coconut Oil Spray)

Brown the butter, meaning…

Place the butter in a medium saucepan and melt over medium-high heat.

Allow the butter to cook until the milk solids bubble up and then settle into the pan and caramelize.
Swirl the butter in the pan in order to see the color of the little bits on the bottom.

As soon as the milk solids are golden and the butter smells nutty, about 3 to 5 minutes, remove the pan from the heat.

Pour the browned butter into a medium bowl and add the chopped chocolate.

Let stand for 1 minute to melt and then whisk together, then whisk in the sugar and vanilla while the butter mixture is still warm.

Stir in the eggs, salt, and espresso powder until well blended.

Over the bowl with the chocolate mixture, sift in the cocoa powder and flour.

Fold the ingredients together until just combined using a spatula.

Pour the batter into the prepared pan or scoop into the jars, filling each about 1 inch high and bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle pulls out clean.

Let cool to room temperature.

With an electric mixer, whip together the butter, peanut butter, and confectioners’ sugar in a large bowl.Continue to mix until everything is well combined and the frosting has lightened in color.

Frost the cooled brownies and finish with the flake salt.

If the brownies are too fudgy to cut, refrigerate for 30 minutes and then cut. Let the brownies sit at room temperature for 10 minutes before serving.

Brownies can be made 1 to 3 days in advance. The frosting can be made up to 1 week in advance.

Mocha Rum Brownies

On a recent trip to Nashville to reunite with some dear college friends, my old roommate and I were aimlessly browsing the aisles and shelves of a little shop in her adorable neighborhood near Vanderbilt University when she spotted a recipe book called Booze Cakes by Krystina Castella and Terry Lee Stone. Needless to say, we were immediately intrigued, and the book ended up coming home with us. Today's recipe is the first of what will certainly be many successful, tasty, and tipsy adaptations of recipes from Booze Cakes.

These Mocha Rum Brownies combine the depth of good espresso with spicy rum, and the next time I make them I might even add a pinch of cayenne pepper and/or cinnamon to the batter to introduce another element of warmth to the flavor combination. The frosting (which also called for rum...because when they say 'booze cakes', they really mean it) was probably my favorite part of the whole recipe. I've had rather inconsistent results with butter cream frostings in past projects, but the proportions here were perfect. I also added an extra tablespoon of rum to the frosting because I was feeling daring. The results weren't disappointing. 

Besides upping the alcohol content in the frosting, the only other adjustment this recipe got for my 4oz jars pertained to baking time. The original instructions called for 40-45 minutes in the oven, but 35 min. was plenty of time for my portions to be done (perhaps even too much?). Then again, I am a staunch proponent of the "gooier is better" camp when it comes to brownies, so my opinions here may be biased. 

Pre-baking ingredient assembly. Your eyes aren't deceiving you -- that is, indeed, a box of brownie mix. One of the perks of this recipe is that its execution is pretty fail-proof. The directions essentially say to "dump all ingredients into a bowl and stir", which is great for beginning chefs, young children (who should omit the rum component, obviously) and those in a hurry. 

I'm glad to have an excuse to use my Italian espresso maker. The recipe called for 1/4 c. of coffee, and this made almost the perfect amount. I happily finished off the left overs, and the caffeine boost propelled me through the rest of the afternoon.

My cookie sheet is pretty ugly. Please ignore that part of this picture. The jar-filling process took twice as long as the batter-mixing process for this recipe, which is a rare phenomenon. Also, if I really wanted these to be pretty, I would have wiped the edges of the jars more carefully after they were filled, but I knew the frosting was going to cover up my shameful drips, so I let 'em ride.

Mocha Rum Brownies all baked and cooling on their wire rack. My kitchen smelled pretty awesome at this point. While the brownies sat, I started on the frosting.

Frosting ingredient assembly. No cheating this time - we're making cocoa butter cream from scratch. Buckle up (or help yourself to some rum...)

Like I said, this frosting was very easy to work with. And delicious.

Mocha Rum Brownie with his topping applied and nicely swirled. There's just one thing missing...

Ah, the raspberry garnish makes all the difference. I think if I served these again I would add more than just one berry to each brownie. A nice trio might look appealing and deliver more flavor (but these matched the picture in the cookbook, so I stuck with just one this time around).

One last look at Mocha Rum Brownies cooling on the window sill. I hardly every have cut, fresh flowers in the house, so I felt the need to document my tulips in this photo too. And the succulent terrarium is another souvenir from my trip to Nashville, which seemed fitting.