Chocolate and peanut butter lovers: delight! This one’s for you, with a rich milk chocolate brownie topped with layers of creamy peanut butter frosting and a luxurious chocolate ganache.

Given the choice between chocolate cake or brownies, I’ll choose the brownie every time, especially when it’s loaded and layered with more chocolate and sweet and salty peanut butter like this one.

I recently had the urge to re-make, re-test, and re-shoot my old Cream Egg brownie recipe from way back in 2012. It’s a great recipe that always sees a little bit of a boost this time of year, but the photos don’t really do it justice. They’re not horrible (I had almost 5 years of experience at that point, if you can believe it… man I’ve been doing this blogging thing for way longer than I realized), but they are definitely not quite the same caliber of images I’m able to capture now. I also wanted to play with the ratios of brownie-filling-topping, and explore swapping the milk chocolate topping with a silky smooth milk chocolate ganache (basically, I can’t leave well enough alone).

A combination of factors, including crummy light and less-than-clean cuts (as a result of my impatience to get it done undoubtedly) failed to please my perfectionist self, and I didn’t end up reshooting the recipe after all. But that’s not to say we didn’t enjoy the spoils of the endeavor nonetheless. As Taylor was shoving the results of my test batch into his mouth, he remarked that his idea of a perfect brownie would be that same fudgy brownie base, a layer of sweet and salty peanut butter in place of the fondant, and a rich ganache topping.

So I made it happen.

The peanut butter layer turned out a bit more buttercream-y than I envisioned (I was shooting for something Reese’s like), but we both decided that it was quite lovely, light and fluffy and perfectly peanut buttery. The hint of salt, in both the brownie layer and the peanut butter layer, cuts the richness of the chocolate beautifully and also amplifies the flavors.

The brownie itself is dense and fudgy (just how I like them), even more so if you let it chill overnight (as hard as that may be, trust me when I say you’ll get much cleaner looking cuts if you wait until the next day).

I used a mix of chocolates, both dark and milk chocolate in both the brownie and the ganache, since, while I love me an ultra-dark chocolate brownie, I couldn’t ignore the fact that milk chocolate pairs so well with peanut butter. I wanted the best of both worlds.

(more…)