This recipe is James Morton’s from a Rachel Allen recipe. James uses dark chocolate rather than white, as he thinks it a better flavour with the peanut butter. I agree, as I discovered, when making Rachel’s original recipe – see my post Peanut Butter and White Chocolate Blondies. I decided to use a mixture of dark and milk chocolate buttons.
Jame calls his recipe brownies, but I’m going with Rachel and calling mine blondies. They are after all, pale, as they contain no cocoa or melted chocolate.
Oh, and although I LOVE the peanut butter in the recipe, I added macadamias to the mixture not peanuts!!!
For James’ brownies, see his beautiful book How Baking Works and What to do if it Doesn’t:
So here is my tweak on James’ and Rachel’s original recipes.
Ingredients
100g softened unsalted butter
150g crunchy peanut butter
150g caster sugar
1 free range egg beaten
1 tsp vanilla extract or paste
100g self-raising flour
50g salted macadamias or peanuts – or any nut really. I think the salt adds a great “salty “!! flavour
100g dark and/or milk chocolate buttons
Method
Preheat the oven to 170 degrees C/150 degrees C fan-forced/Gas Mark 3. Place a square of baking paper into a 20cm (8 inch) square tin.
In a food processor or a large bowl, beat the butter, peanut butter and sugar together until paste-like. Add the egg and vanilla and beat until combined. James says not to worry about too much beating so long as the ingredients are combined.
Add the flour, nuts and chocolate, stirring gently to combine. Dollop the mixture into the cake tin and spread out to the edges (the mixture will be quite stiff and hard to spread).
Bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes or until golden brown on top and a skewer inserted comes out clean.
The Quirk and the Cool 