Reese's Pieces Chocolate Brownies

Once a month I spend the best part of a day (and evening) at a design agency we use to produce a particular project. We sit with the designers while they make our final changes, tweak the layout and so on – the last time I was there, we didn’t finish until late in the evening so a colleague and I went to grab a burger at Five Guys. This time around I was going prepared- with snacks! It’s always nice to find other people to bake for, as it can get a bit much taking cakes into work too often. But I was out until 10pm the night before on my cake decorating class, and wondered what I could possibly throw together in less than an hour, that would also be easy to pack into Tupperware and take with me the next day. The answer of course is chocolate brownies!

I’ve made enough brownies before that I wanted to do something a bit different this time. I had the idea of Mini Egg Brownies as we are coming up to Easter, but while the supermarket was full of Easter eggs, I couldn’t find a single packet of Mini Eggs. Perhaps I will make those a bit nearer to Easter! So I got home with the main ingredients for the brownies but nothing extra to add in, and cast my eye around the house – it fell upon a jar of Reece’s Pieces mini  peanut butter cups, nestling behind the Kitchenaid (out of sight otherwise I’m sure I would have eaten them by now!). I knew that would work and debated just throwing them into a basic brownie recipe but then decided to see if Hershey’s – the maker of Reese’s – had a recipe on their website. And they had plenty, some of which I have bookmarked to come back to!

I used this recipe but changed it a bit – I didn’t add the extra layer of peanut butter on top, as I thought it might be a bit much (I didn’t know if many people at the design agency were peanut butter fans – my boyfriend for instance doesn’t really like it) and rather than using the miniature peanut butter cups and sprinkling them throughout the mixture, I used whole ones pressed down in the tin in rows. I think with all those changes I can call this

Reese's Pieces Chocolate Brownies - an original recipe by Caroline Makes...

You need:

1/2 cup butter or margarine

2 cups caster sugar

2/3 cup cocoa powder

4 eggs

3/4 cup self-raising flour

approx. 16-20 Reese's Pieces peanut butter cups

Preheat oven to 180C. Grease and line a square brownie tin.

Melt the butter in a small pan over the low heat; add the sugar and cocoa powder and stir gently until the sugar has dissolved and you have a thick chocolate mixture. Remove from the heat.

Transfer to a bowl and beat in the eggs then fold in the flour.

Pour the mixture into the prepared tin. Unwrap the Reese's Pieces peanut butter cups and gently press down into the mixture in rows.

Bake in the oven for 25-30 minutes then allow to cool.

Use the position of the Reese's Pieces to show where to cut into squares. You can see they have roughly held their shape and you can definitely spot them inside the brownies.

These tasted very good - the peanut butter gave a salty yet sweet contrast to the rest of the brownie. These went down very well with the agency!

I'm sharing these with We Should Cocoa, as the theme this month is chocolate brownies. The challenge is hosted this month by Katie at Recipe for Perfection on behalf of Choclette at Chocolate Log Blog.