Peanut Butter Brownies from Scratch!

My most recent pride & joy, the peanut butter brownies started the whole kitchen play day on Saturday morning! I knew I wanted to make something to send to work with Kyle to share with the guys (they love that and I enjoy making yummy stuff for them). I asked if Ky wanted chocolate chip cookies or brownies and he requested brownies. We have lots of ingredients, but didn't have a mix, so I looked online and found out I could make brownies from scratch. At this point, let me interject and say that I've never desired a brownie recipe from scratch because we've found a winner and it can't be beaten. Ghirardelli makes the BEST double chocolate brownie mix, hands down. However, since we didn't have it and I was up for a challenge, I decided to make these myself, and change them up a bit to become peanut butter-y :)

I found a good recipe here and set to work. I preheated the oven to 350, and greased a rectangular bread pan (we don't have a square pan and I didn't want to double to 9x13 this time). Then I gathered these ingredients:

- 1/2 cup butter 1/2 cup applesauce! (saw the recommendation in the notes on allrecipes.com and decided to cut out the butter). LOVE this change.
- 1 cup white sugar (stuck with this, might try blue agave syrup in exchange for some sugar next time, but I need to find out the conversion).
- 2 eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- 1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1/2 cup all-purpose flour (I used whole wheat flour)
- 1/4 tsp. salt (kosher)
- 1/4 tsp. baking powder
**Note: I also added about 1/3 cup of chocolate chips and 1/4 cup of peanut butter. This is key.
**One of our roommates said that if you want gooey brownies, you should add olive oil, so I put in a little bit of that, too!

I followed these instructions:
1. In a large saucepan, melt butter warm applesauce. Remove from heat, and stir in sugar, eggs (beaten beforehand) and 1 tsp vanilla. Mix in cocoa, flour, salt and baking powder, (then chocolate chips and olive oil). Be careful not to over-mix! Spread batter into pan.
2. Bake for 25-30 minutes. Mine was extra moist, so I gave it about an extra 8 minutes in the oven, until a skewer stick came out a little chocolaty, but not too wet.
3. Cool.


THEN came the frosting...
3 tablespoons butter, softened (I did use the butter here, since it was a lot less)
3 tablespoons unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tablespoon honey
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 cup confectioners' sugar
**I added in a little cinnamon and about a 1/4 cup of peanut butter!

To Make Frosting: Combine 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons cocoa, 1 tablespoon honey, 1 teaspoon vanilla, and 1 cup confectioners' sugar. Add sprinkle of cinnamon and stir in peanut butter. Frost brownies while they are still warm.

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To say that these brownies were delicious is an understatement. They were super moist, peanut buttery and even tasted a little different texture-wise with the applesauce. I wanted to make sure they were done, but might cook for a few minutes less if I were to make these again because in the end, they were a little bit cakey on the outside. Still so good and the icing was awesome. Kyle brought these to work after I enjoyed 1 and everybody loved them. We shared a couple with roommates, too, and they left a little thank you note with a big 'YUM!' on it. Hurray :) They were a hit! Fun to make something new, change it up and have it work :) I love it! So glad we have this blog to document it all, too!!!