Today's my birthday. I won't tell you how old I am, that will just depress me. Instead, I'll pretend I'm still 25 and we'll all be happier.
Last week was my vacation, I took a week off from work to spend time with my brother and his family who were visiting from Illinois. We celebrated my birthday on Friday. Since it was my birthday, my father and my niece picked out a great cake from an Amish bakery. I was just happy I wasn't expected to bake my own birthday cake.
Knowing my love of Trader Joe's, my sister-in-law brought me a bag full of baking supplies from TJ's. They also got me the Star Wars Cupcake Stencils from Williams Sonoma, but that's for another post.
One of the items they brought were the wonderful Trader Joe's mini Peanut Butter Cups that I used in a previous post Trader Joe's and Peanut Butter Cup Brownies.
Unfortunately, chocolate peanut butter cups can't handle car rides half way across the country in July heat.
But we weren't going to give up on them. We tossed around ideas like chopping them up and using it as an ice cream topping. But, being me, I wanted to find a use for them in baking.
A couple weeks ago, I came up with Gooey Rolo Brownies and they ended up being very delicious and quite popular. So I decided to tweak the recipe a bit and create these Decadent Peanut Butter Cup brownies.
I used the same base brownie recipe from Hersheykitchen.com: Sensational Peppermint Pattie Brownies.
Instead of the Peppermint Patties, I used regular sized Reese's Peanut Butter Cups to layer in the middle of the brownies.
I wanted to use the regular PB cups because they're thinner and wider than the minis and I wanted to use them to cover more ground. It took 24 PB cups to create the middle layer.
I spread the rest of the batter on top of the peanut butter cups and baked the brownies for about 50 minutes.
While the brownies were baking, I took a fork to the melted mini peanut butter cups and broke them up into chunks.
I took the brownies out of the oven and sprinkled the mini PB cups all over the top and put them back into the oven for about 4 minutes.
The candy was melty and soft when I took them out.
I used an offset spatula to spread the melted PB cups all over the top.
These brownies were moist and had just the right amount of peanut butter to chocolate ratio.
I discovered that both the Gooey Rolo Brownies and the Decadent Peanut Butter Cup Brownies are even better the next day.
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