Peanut Butter and Chocolate....

......my favorite sweet combo.

Anna over at Cookie Madness always has yummy treats coming out of her oven, but these pb chocolate brownies really called out to me, especially when Anna pointed out that the peanut butter mixture does not use cream cheese. Don't get me wrong, I do like cream cheese swirled-brownies, but when it comes to peanut butter, especially when it's paired with chocolate, I want the peanut butter to be front and center. Cream cheese tends to dominate and tends to make things a tad too sweet.

To make the ribbons, you melt together the peanut butter, peanut butter chips and butter and then spread it out on wax paper. As you can see, I was not all that neat about this part.

While the peanut butter mixture is chilling, you mix up the batter. Once the batter is ready, the pb mixture can be taken out of the fridge and cut into ribbons. Half the batter goes into the prepared pan and topped with half the pb ribbons. The remaining batter is gently spread over top and then the brownies go into the oven. After the brownies are finished baking and while they are still warm, the rest of the pb strips go on top. They are a bit more work than I am used to in a brownie, but worth every bit of it.

Peanut Butter Ribbon Fudge Brownies

These brownies are delicious. In fact, DH immediately requested that I make them again. The brownies are moist and chocolaty and the peanut butter flavor in the ribbons really comes through. I used Smucker's Natural PB and though I haven't tried it with regular PB and therefore have nothing to compare it with, I have a feeling the natural PB kicks up the nutty flavor even more and I wouldn't try it any other way. The only thing I might change is to put all of the peanut butter inside the brownie - I wasn't all that fond of fussing with the peanut butter strips and trying to get them to look nice.

This recipe is definitely a keeper. We tried them out on a fairly large crowd and everyone raved about them.