Reese's Cake

So I've moved to a new house, with a new kitchen, and a stove that works way better than the one at my last place. And I received a housewarming gift that will benefit the stomachs, if not the waistlines, of all who come in contact with my baking: my very own Kitchenaid stand mixer!

In the moving madness I failed to write about a delicious Devil's Food cake, with a chocolate/almond frosting. However, I'm on another baking adventure tonight, and ready to blog about it. It's a peanut butter chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting!

So I started with the basic cake:

2 1/4 cups flour
2 cups sugar
3 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1 stick butter
3/4 cup milk (I'm actually using Silk PureCoconut milk these days. I love it!)
Splash in some vanilla
3 egg

Then I mixed in the secret ingredient. In a separate cup, I melted down 2 squares of unsweetened chocolate, a generous scoop of peanut butter, and the remnants of an opened bag of Reese's baking chips. When that was a gooey, delicious mess, I mixed it into the cake mix, poured it into my pan, and stuck it in the oven.

While the cake was baking, I made one of the best frostings that I have ever made from scratch. This stuff is seriously amazing. I melted one stick of butter, and about 1 cup of peanut butter (in the same container I used to melt the peanut butter chocolate mixture earlier, giving it just a hint of chocolate) and poured that into my bowl. I poured in some powdered sugar (2ish cups) I added a smidge more of the secret ingredient and a splash of the PureCoconut. I let my mixer have at it, and gave it a test once it looked good. It wasn't quite there, so I added a but more powdered sugar, and let the mixer have at it again. It was good to go after that. In fact, damn amazing. Oh man, we're lucky I haven't eaten it all.

But since it is late, and this tyrtle has to get up early for work, there is no time to frost the cake. It'll have to cool over night, and I'll frost it when I take it to dinner tomorrow. Hooray cake! Hooray mixer! Baking is the best, I swear.

Peanut Butter Dark Chocolate Brownies

It's been a while since I've baked much, but I felt like baking today. Besides, I haven't fed my new coworkers any of my crack yet ^_-

You want to mix together a cup of sugar, an egg, a splash of vanilla, a cup of flour, 1/4 tsp salt, and 1/2 tsp baking powder. In a microwave safe container, melt down a nice chunk of butter (1/4 a stickish) and 3-5 squares of baking chocolate (depending how chocolatey you like). And cause these are dark chocolate, go ahead and throw in an extra square. You know you want to. Mix that in with the rest of your batter. This time around I also threw in a dash of cinnamon and a slightly larger dash of nutmeg. Just trust me on that. And some secret ingredient... because secrets make everything taste better.

I might as well be endorsed by Reese's, because I love baking with Reese's Peanut Butter Chips. They are super tasty and make pretty much any recipe better. So to mix in that peanut butter flavor, I melted down a full bag, and added them to the mix. Usually I'd do half peanut butter chips, and half actual peanut butter, but I don't have any at the moment. I swear this works just as well; using the real peanut butter is just a cheaper option. If you're going to go straight peanut butter and ignore the deliciousness of the peanut butter chips... add some extra sugar.

Anyway batter -> pan -> oven -> delicious.

After work edit:

My coworkers devoured these before lunch. And baking is totally the way to make friends at work. They all had to come tell me how much they loved them!