Chocolate-Peanut Butter Brownies

This is very exciting...this is the 200th blog post on New Recipe Night!! Can I get a woot woot? It has been about 5 years since we started doing New Recipe Night, and about 3ish years or so that we have been doing the blog, so 200 doesn't seem like too much, but that's okay, it is what it is. We had some hiatuses due to Haiti trips, childbirth, etc. Anyway, tonight my husband went to the Stand for Marriage rally in Augusta, and I stayed home with my kiddos and baked brownies. I have been trying to bake more lately, in an effort to cut our Little Debbie consumption. My kids have become conditioned to have dessert every day after lunch. Of course at the store they each want their own box of Little Debbie treats. And of course they are so bad for us! So far my plan is working, I haven't bought any LD for the last 2 big shopping trips, and the kids haven't noticed. I let Sam in on the plan, because I reminded him that those things are not good for us, and he is the oldest child and most likely to notice the change. Homemade cookies and brownies are not exactly healthy, but they are cheaper and less preservatives etc than the LD variety. He is down with the plan. These brownies are a variation listed under the "Chocolate Brownies" recipe in the Betty Crocker cookbook I am working my way through; Steve loves peanut butter so I thought we would give these a try. I am going to list the peanut butter way, which is how I made them, rather than typing the regular recipe with the variation on the bottom like it is in the book.

Chocolate-Peanut Butter Brownies
1/3 cup stick margarine or butter (I love real butter, so that's what I used)
1/3 cup peanut butter
5 oz unsweetened baking chocolate, cut into pieces (used my PC food chopper)
1 3/4 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla
3 large eggs
1 cup flour
16 mini peanut butter cups

Heat oven to 350. Grease bottom and sides of 9x9 pan with shortening. Melt butter and chocolate in saucepan over low heat, stirring constantly. Cool slightly (I only let it cool long enough to do the next step, which is the mixing). Beat sugar, vanilla, and eggs in medium bowl with electric mixer on high speed 5 minutes (this made it very light and foamy and almost looked like cream). Beat in chocolate mixture on low speed. Beat in flour just until blended. Spread in pan. Arrange the peanut butter cups over top; press into batter so tops of cups are even with top of batter. Bake 40-45 minutes or just until brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan (that never happened for me, maybe because I used cooking spray instead of shortening). Cool completely in pan on wire rack. Cut into about 2-inch squares.

As you can clearly see, this is A LOT more work than my usual method of brownie making, which is to open the box, add egg, oil, and water to the mix, and bake. The million dollar question: is it worth it? Well, I don't know...I know every ingredient that went into these brownies, even if some of them are "unhealthy," like the butter and sugar. The brownie mix I have in my cupboard has: bleached flour (I always buy unbleached now...it's the same price and eating bleach is apparently bad for you, although I have not read any studies, just talked to friends who say that white flour and white sugar = the devil); both corn syrup AND high fructose corn syrup (which another of my friends HATES and has joined a group on facebook called "I hate HFCS" which is apparently it's nickname since the whole name is rather long); a preservative called potassium sorbate (don't know what that is exactly but I know it's not in the from-scratch ones); and, since I bought the "supreme" mix because I had a coupon, this box also contains a packet of chocolate syrup that you mix into the batter before cooking, and that has mono and diglycerides in it as well as 3 other ingredients with long names that I don't know what they are or do. When I type it out like this, it seems like a no-brainer to only make them from scratch. But it seriously took me like 4 times longer to make this kind. Granted, I have never made them before, and maybe going forward it would be faster. Not sure. Anyway, these definitely tasted different than our usual fare, probably because I am used to all the artificial stuff...the kids & hubby haven't tried them yet because by the time they were cool it was way too late for brownies. I had one, though, and thought they were pretty good. 4-times-longer good? Don't know...I will have to wait for Steve's input once he tries them. I know of course the fewer ingredients the better. I am sure you have reached the same conclusion that I am about to come to: make from scratch when time allows, and use the mix I have when time is short. And once that mix is used, never buy one again. Ha ha.