Peanut Butter & Banana Brownies

I’ve been looking for something special to bake for my boyfriend’s birthday and yesterday I saw this recipe for Peanut Butter Brownies on The Baker Chick’s blog. This was almost perfect but while he does love peanut butter and chocolate, his perfect pud isn’t complete without bananas so I thought I’d see what happened if I added some in!

I’m a bit of a nightmare for measuring precisely so I’ve converted the original recipe into specifics as opposed to cups. For some reason I really enjoy measuring to exact amounts – I’m just weird that way!

Ingredients:

Chocolate Brownie Mix:
115g unsalted butter
85g dark chocolate (min 70% cocoa)
200g sugar
2 large eggs
2 tsp vanilla essence
75g plain flour
30g cocoa powder
Pinch of salt
2 bananas

Peanut Butter Cheesecake Mix:
170g cream cheese (e.g. Philadelphia)
150g smooth peanut butter
50g sugar
1 large egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla essence

Chocolate Chips to decorate

Preheat the oven to 180C

1. Combine the peanut butter cheesecake ingredients in a bowl and mix together thoroughly with a wooden spoon. Set to one side.

2. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a glass bowl over a saucepan of boiling water. Stir occasionally until fully melted.

3. Remove from the heat and add the sugar, eggs, vanilla essence and salt and whisk together. Then mix in the flour and cocoa powder. Pour the brownie mix into a square tin or brownie pan.

4. Mash up the bananas in a bowl with a fork. Don’t mash them two finely as this will allow chunks of banana to run throughout the brownies. Stir into the chocolate brownie batter.

5.. Dollop the cheesecake mix onto the brownie batter, it’s quite thick so it isn’t possible to spread evenly. Instead I lumped it on across the mix and then used a knife to swirl it in. This leaves lovely big chunks of peanut butter in each brownie.

6. Finally sprinkle on some chocolate chips and place in the middle of the oven for 35-40 minutes. I found if it still wiggled in the middle it wasn’t cooked enough so put it back for 5-10 minutes but it depends on how firm you want the centre brownies to be. They will firm up but may be quite sticky.