Multilayered Peanut Butter/Chocolate Cheesecake

As you may have noticed, every year for my husband’s birthday I try out another recipe featuring peanut butter and chocolate– his favorite flavor combination! This year is no exception! Not content with a simple cake with frosting, I decided to go in a slightly different direction and make a chocolate-peanut-butter cheesecake– but not just any cheesecake! A layered cheesecake, with a chocolate wafer crust and a shiny ganache glaze, adapted from my favorite food blogger, Deb at Smitten Kitchen.

Granted, her recipe was a chocolate/coffee cheesecake, but it was simple to adapt by replacing the espresso with a few tablespoons of peanut butter, making for rich and decadent dessert. Annoyingly, my layers tended to separate at one or two spots when sliced– I’m betting my filling was just slightly overbaked, making it too dry to adhere easily– but the finished cake was still very impressive, and very delicious! Warning: the cake looks small on a serving platter, but even very thin slices can be tough to finish due to their richness!

Swirled Peanut Butter Blondies

“Didn’t you already make peanut butter blondies?” you might ask. Why, yes… yes, I did. But I forgot about that until I’d already started melting the butter for these, and figured that you can never have too many peanut butter blondie recipes, so I proceeded on.

These blondies are slightly different from my previous recipe– you melt the butter and sugar instead of creaming it, there’s a bit less butter and sugar, and it doesn’t need the extra egg yolk. Plus there’s the added bonus of a peanut butter swirl right through the middle, which– come on– can only be a good thing!

I underbaked these, which made them very soft at room temperature but amazing when frozen, so I highly recommend that you do the same. And be generous with the sprinkling of salt on top– it really pops.

Peanut Butter-Chocolate Fault Line Cake

So, once I’d made my cake layers, my fudge frosting, and a peanut butter cream cheese frosting (no real recipe here, I just beat together 4 oz. each of butter and cream cheese, added about 3/4 cup of peanut butter and a splash of vanilla, and then added powdered sugar until the texture was right), it was finally time to assemble the cake.

First, I removed my frozen cake layers and set them on the counter to thaw. After about 45 minutes they were cold enough to be firm but thawed enough to be workable, so I used a long, serrated knife to level off the tops. I stacked them with peanut butter frosting and ran a thin crumb-coat over the whole thing before setting it in the refrigerator to chill for another 20 minutes or so. At this point I will note that I made a mistake in using crunchy peanut butter (what I had on hand) for the frosting, because peanut chunks do not make for a smooth crumb coat. Oh well…

Chocolate Peanut Butter Stuffed Cookies

So the first time I made these, it was a snowy day. A very snowy day, as evidenced by the closing of schools and offices everywhere and the piles of snow accumulating on all windows, roofs, and visible scenery (not to mention blowing horizontally through the air). And what does one do on a snow day? Bake, of course!

I know that I often re-post Smitten Kitchen’s recipes, mostly only slightly revised, but this time I’m just going to refer you to her page directly for the recipe for these fabulous cookies. Why, you ask? Because I didn’t really change the recipe much, plus my photos turned out terribly and didn’t add anything to the explanatory process that wasn’t already clearly set out in her photos. It hardly seems worth it when the only thing I did to alter the recipe was use extra-crunchy peanut butter instead of creamy. To be fair, I had to use a bit *more* peanut butter and a splash of milk to make up for the lack of moisture caused by the inclusion of peanut chunks, but that was about it.

I got 24 cookies out of this recipe, using a level mini-cookie-scoop (just over a teaspoon) to scoop the peanut butter filling, and then dividing up the chocolate dough into 24 pieces of about 30g each. I baked them for exactly 10 minutes and they came out perfectly– don’t worry about underbaking!

Anyway, these are good. Very good. My peanut butter/chocolate loving husband proclaimed them to be excellent. They’re best slightly warm, but straight out of the freezer is a close second. Either way, you’ll want a tall glass of milk to go along with them.

Peanut Butter Blondies

Yup, it’s another peanut butter-chocolate recipe. And another Smitten Kitchen recipe, to boot. But these peanut butter blondies are easy to make, extremely tasty, and just as good frozen as they are fresh, so I’m not going to worry too much about repetitiveness or derivativeness (is that even a word?).

This recipe makes a full 9×13″ pan of ganache-topped peanut butter blondies, studded with chocolate chips and with just enough peanut butter flavor to hit your tastebuds without being overwhelming. They’re rich but addictive.

The texture is great, too, though I will note that many of the reviewers of the original recipe found the baking time to be too long, resulting in dry blondies. I baked mine just until a toothpick emerged with tons of moist crumbs, and also found the edges too dry for my taste– this may have been due to the fact that I used a glass pan, which retains heat better than metal pans and which will basically keep the cooking process going even after the pan is removed from the oven. If you’re using a glass pan, I would recommend taking the blondies out of the oven after 30-35 minutes. If you’re using a metal pan, 35-40 should be fine.

Flourless Peanut Butter Cookies

I have to admit that peanut butter cookies are generally not my first choice when it comes to desserts. However, my husband is a HUGE fan of peanut butter in anything, so when I saw an old Smitten Kitchen post about these cookies– supposedly the ultimate peanut butter treat– I had to try my hand at them.

Interestingly, while they’ve been billed as soft and creamy and almost peanut-butter-cup-like in texture, with a domed shape that lends itself to soft centers and crisp outsides, I didn’t get that result at all. Instead, mine were flat and chewy– still very tasty and still devoured quickly by both my husband and daughter, but not what I was expecting.

Chocolate Peanut Butter Icebox Cake

Since my husband is a huge fan of peanut butter and chocolate, I always try to make him a peanut butter and chocolate cake for his birthday. So when I saw this one on Smitten Kitchen, especially once I realized it used my favorite chocolate cookie recipe as a base, I had to make it.

I really followed Deb’s recipe almost exactly (I increased the peanut butter cream recipe to use a whole pint of cream instead of 1 1/2 cups), so I’m not going to bother reproducing it here– just follow this link! But here are some photos of the process so you can see how it works!

The finished cake is wonderful– light and creamy, yet still rich and decadent. And there’s something particularly indulgent about sliding your fork down through each distinct layer and feeling just the slightest resistance before the softened wafers give way, one by one. The peanut butter works nicely with the dark chocolate, though I still think this would be amazing using whipped cream spiked with Kahlua. I’ll have to give it a try sometime.

Peanut Butter Fudge Ice Cream Cake

My husband is a huge fan of peanut butter and chocolate, and every year for his birthday I have to come up with a new variation on the combo for his birthday cake. This year is probably one of my favorites. There’s a thin layer of chocolate cake on the bottom, topped with a no-churn peanut butter ice cream studded with peanut butter cups and swirled with fudge. Then it’s topped with another thin layer of cake, which is covered in a layer of fudge-y peanut butter and chocolate ganache. Drooling yet? Keep looking at the pictures…

My favorite part about this recipe is that each component is so easy to make. The cake is a one-bowl recipe, no softening butter or separating eggs required. The ice cream is no-churn and has so few ingredients that you can whip it up (literally) in minutes. The ganache is made in the microwave, without any worries about chocolate seizing or burning or doing whatever else chocolate does when you try to melt it over the stovetop. Yet despite the simplicity of each component, the finished cake is a showstopper! The cake freezes just hard enough to stand up to the ice cream, the ice cream itself maintains much of its softness in the freezer (no rock-hard slices here!), and the ganache is just firm enough to give you a nice bite of fudginess when you put a forkful in your mouth.

Try this. You’ll thank me.