Our recipe for the day is a quick and easy one-bowl Brownie Cheesecake Bars with Peanut butter yielding the fudgiest and rich bars. Imagine your brownies being complemented with some peanut butter, and cheesecake flavor! All the good things that you can imagine in a bar.
That is exactly what we are going to achieve here. This recipe is a hybrid of a brownie and cheesecake. These Brownie go super dope in your mouth altogether as you bite into them.
A quick note here is that these are super decadent bars. Certainly not for someone with an inch of guilt quotient.
Well, the definition of the perfect brownie is as subjective as anything can get. Mine is the rich, fudgy, and soft brownies. What is your kind of brownie??
I like to add peanut butter or caramel during baking and then, serve my brownies with some cream cheese frosting. But today I am whipping together a quick recipe which has everything in its one bite. Just to clarify once again. These are not brownies, but a cheesecake version of brownies.
Despite having so many components, this recipe is simple, quick, and easy.
The first thing in brownie is chocolate. So, the quality of chocolate decides your result. If you are making the fudgy brownies, you need to use some premium dark chocolate, which will make your brownies rich and dense. Some use only cocoa powder, which needs to be hydrated and mixed, leading to a lot of air incorporation into the batter, making the brownies lighter and fluffier.
The fudgy ones need less flour than cakey ones. And it’s the other way around for butter. More the butter, fudgier the brownie will be. So, in case you have issues with the texture, just try modifying any of these ingredients to improvise this recipe to suit your preference.
In this brownie recipe, I am using unsweetened dark chocolate, you can use sweet ones if you wish, just reduce the sugar by half. But I would highly recommend using the ones with high cacao content. The unsweetened chocolate has the highest cacao content which yields the best chocolatey fudge. Rest is your choice as I said earlier.
Also, feel free to add any kind of nuts into the brownie as nuts provide a great texture contrast and flavor complement to these brownie Cheesecake bars.
Brownie Cheesecake Bars with Peanut butter
Ingredients
- 3 oz Unsweetened bakers chocolate
- ½ cup butter
- 1 ½ Cup Sugar divided (1 cup +½ cup)
- ¾ cup Condensed milk
- ¾ cup all-purpose flour
- 2 tablespoon Cacao powder
- ¼ cup Whole Milk
- 8 oz Cream cheese
- ½ cup Peanut butter
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 350 0F and line an 8 inch greased square baking pan with parchment paper.
- Cream together cream cheese and sugar ( ½ cup) using a stand mixer or a hand mixer until light and airy. Set aside.
- In a large bowl, add finely chopped chocolate and butter stick cut into small pieces.
- Create a hot water bath, over which melt the chocolate and butter until it gets fully lump-free and smooth. Keep stirring continuously.
- Remove the bowl from heat and add 1 cup of sugar and sweetened condensed milk (when the chocolate is still warm).
- Now, fold in the flour and cacao powder to form a batter. Add milk to form a lump-free batter.
- Pour the batter into the baking pan, and spread evenly using an offset spatula.
- Once the brownie batter is leveled, add scoops of cream cheese and peanut butter alternately over the brownie batter. And using a chopstick, knife, or something similar, with a swirl motion, combine peanut butter and cream cheese with the brownie batter creating a zebra effect.
- Bake for 43-45 minutes until done.
- Let cool completely for around 30 minutes and then remove them from the pan by pulling up the parchment paper.
- Use a sharp knife dipped in hot water to cut neat slices of brownie and enjoy!!
Notes
- Choosing the right pan is important. Always use the metal pan and avoid porcelain and glass pans. As metal pans are great conductors and ideal for baking at lower temperatures.
- Line the baking pan with two crisscross parchment papers. Firstly, grease the entire pan with butter or cooking spray. Then cover it with a parchment paper covering the base and two opposite sides. Then, grease the bottom of the parchment and lay another parchment paper of the same dimension covering the base and the remaining two sides. This makes the brownie removal process easy as they are very delicate and nobody wants to break their brownies while removing from the pan.
- Have everything at room temperature. Chocolates at room temperature are much easier to chop and so is the case with the creaming of cream cheese. Take out your butter off the fridge. And did you forget the milk? This is the thumb rule of baking. Every ingredient should be at room temperature.
- Choose to use creamy peanut butter as it is easier to spread and mix as compared to the chunky ones.
- Taste your batter as you go on with the recipe, add more sugar if you think it is less sweet for your palate.
- Take care not to overmix, the cream cheese and peanut butter, as I do. (Always….) It is just so satisfying!! Swirling the chocolate batter and the peanut butter..!! and the cream cheese…!!! I tend to overdo it. Like always! Avoid the temptation if you can. Or just join the league 🙂
- These are super rich and decadent. Therefore are a high-calorie food.
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