The first book I’ll be baking from is The Art & Soul of Baking by Cindy Mushet. It’s a hefty volume (my favorite kind) with lots of pictures. I had some reservations about it as it is part of a cookbook series by Sur La Table. I was afraid the book would turn out to be a very expensive advertisement for their stores, but I was wrong. The book covers a wide variety of baked goods, including a pretty good section on yeasted breads. There are also some savory recipes scattered throughout. In thumbing through the book, I quickly realized that I wanted to try just about every recipe in there. Another good omen is the fact that Mushet includes weights of ingredients as well as volumes. Oh yeah, baby! The first recipe that caught my eye was the peanut butter and chocolate marbled brownies.

At pretty young ages, my sister and I figured out that we preferred our brownies only mostly done. We had a microwave recipe that became our specialty. The edges were chewy in a microwave-baked sort of way, but the middle was best eaten with a spoon. These days, I still prefer a fudgy brownie over a cakey brownie, but even for me, these brownies weren’t cooked enough.

I had high hopes for this recipe. I mean, come on, peanut butter and chocolate? In a brownie? So I whipped up the batter, poured it into the pan and attempted to swirl it. According to the directions, you pour little over half the peanut butter batter in the bottom of the pan, top that with all of the chocolate batter and then dollop the remaining peanut butter batter on top and swirl everything together. Well, with less than half the peanut butter batter, I still ended up with too much peanut butter batter on top. Instead of getting swirls, I got another layer of peanut butter batter. I can live with that, although if I make this again, I’ll use most of the peanut butter batter on the bottom, instead of only half.

So into the oven. The brownies are supposed to bake for  30-40 minutes. I ended up baking them for about 55 minutes before a toothpick inserted into the middle came out with only a few moist crumbs attached. At that point the top layer was dangerously dark. The brownies had also risen in the pan almost all the way to the top, which I thought was strange. 

After cooling for about an hour, we cut into them and found that a thick top crust had separated and left nearly an inch of space between it and the rest of the brownies. Except for about an inch around the edges, the rest of the batter was so wet that it barely held together after cutting and couldn’t be picked up with one’s fingers.

Looking back over the recipe, here’s what I think happened: According to the directions, three eggs are beaten slightly and then added to the batter a tablespoon at a time and beaten, on medium speed, until each addition has been incorporated thoroughly. Now, according to Shirley O. Corriher in BakeWise, the more you beat eggs in a batter (brownies, cakes and cookies), the more of a separated crust you get on the finished item. Next time, I think I’ll try stirring in the eggs by hand to see if that prevents the crust from forming. I also think that will help the brownies bake more evenly.

The taste was okay. The brownies were quite rich and the peanut butter flavor came through pretty clearly. I think these have promise, but the recipe needs some tweaking.