Have eggs, will bake...

Every now and then I get to the stage where we've either run out of some particular foodstuff and need to go shopping, or have a glut of a foodstuff and need to use them up quickly before they go out of date.  Past excesses have included, but are not limited to, Maltesers, Crunchie bars, cucumbers (that was a weird one) and so on.  Today's glut was eggs.  My first thought was to make an omlette for the kids for dinner.  Then I came to my senses and remembered that I also had some Reese's Mini Peanut Butter cups to use up.  Fortuitous, no?

The recipe I use calls for cocoa and chopped chocolate, so sometimes I add in different things in place of the chocolate.  Today, I thought I'd try some peanut butter and chopped Reese's.  Another time I'd used white chocolate chips, or Reese's pieces and so on.  (I really should link here to those previous posts, but sadly I can't find them).

As with the Oreo cookie brownies from a few weeks ago, I left some of the pieces out so I could scatter them across the top, thus making sure that each brownie had some filling.

I think some of the chopped mini cups must have melted, because it doesn't look like there was so much throughout the brownie once baked, hmmm...

I'll wait till the girls get home from school, and we'll all try some then.  Then we'll know how much of a peanut butter taste runs through these delicious chocolatey treats, mmm...

Reese's Peanut Butter Cup cake, oh my!

I had seen a photo of this cake and fallen in love.  But seriously, chocolate cake, peanut butter icing and chocolate ganache - when are you gonna eat a cake like that??  And no-one was likely to order one, because they wouldn't know that I wanted to bake it.  So...  I had to wait for just the right occasion.  Which came during the just-ended October school holidays. 

A good friend of mine L (we met first in the post-delivery labour ward, our girls are twins-from-other-mothers), whom we don't see often enough, invited us over to play.  They'd been over to play at our place during the holiday-week before and I'd only noticed that it was her birthday in the weekend between playdates late the night before they were coming to us, and really didn't feel like baking something then.  Wrote a card, but no baking.

Then inspiration hit when she mentioned that she was going to do a peanut choc traybake for her family party at the weekend - Eureka!!  I could make this cake for our playdate, woo hoo.  I thought to make it in my new 6" tin (partly because it's less cake to eat and partly because it's kinda cute and still a novelty for me).  After checking with a mutual friend J (who was also coming to the playdate) that her peanut-allergic girls could be near the cake as long as they didn't touch it, I went ahead.

I had found these beauties recently at a nearby supermarket and had to buy them, knowing that at some point soon I wanted to need them...

I had looked up few different recipes for a peanut butter cup cake, then realised I could just muddle through it myself.  I had a chocolate fudge cake recipe that I wanted to try, so used that as the base.  Then made my usual vanilla buttercream but instead of adding vanilla I kept adding tablespoons of peanut butter until I thought the taste was strong enough.  First I used up all our smooth peanut butter, then onto the crunchy stuff.  After that I made chocolate ganache using 120ml of double cream and 120g of dark chocolate (with a bit of milk mixed in so it would be sweet enough for Mr Becca to taste some).  As you may agree, that was a bit too much ganache, as it dribbled all down the sides and pooled at the base.  But I still think it looked good, and more importantly, so did the birthday girl and everyone who saw it.

And the best bit?  It tasted amazing!!!  Rich, decadent and more-ish, yummy.