February 10: Cream Cheese Brownies Day

It's Cream Cheese Brownies Day!  I figured that cream cheese brownies just meant that cream cheese was mixed into the batter before baking.  Well, it can be, but there are quite a few variations on cream cheese brownies.  Some recipes call for the cream cheese to be a separate layer on top of a chocolate layer, while others use the cream cheese to create a marbled effect.  Here's a quick round-up of recipes I looked at:

• Smitten Kitchen's Cream Cheese Brownies is a marbled brownie recipe adapted from Cook's Illustrated.  It was also tweaked a couple of  years later.
• Stylish Cuisine has a layered recipe that she declares is the best brownie she's ever had.  Supposedly, these are best straight from the freezer.
• This cream cheese brownie recipe is a marbled type, but tatkes the short-cut of using a brownie mix.  So does this Betty Crocker recipe. 
• I really wanted to try this Joy of Cooking recipe, but I don't have any metal bowls.
• Like raspberries?  Then you might want to try this recipe from Brown Eyed Baker that uses raspberries.

Eventually, I picked this recipe from Kraft.  Since I have no large microwave-safe bowl, I melted the butter and chocolate using my Micro Pitcher set from Tupperware (that thing is awesome!) and then poured the melted butter and chocolate into a mixing bowl.  Otherwise, I just followed the recipe as it is written.  One little puzzle I ran into was that the cream cheese mixture was a lot of mixture!  I was expecting it to be a smaller amount but there was enough that I could have probably made it a layered brownie.  Also, swirling the two batters together was a bit problematic - the chocolate layer was really thick.  The recipe says to swirl gently which I figured was just cutting a knife through in various directions.  Nope!  This took some actual swirling to get the batters to mix in a nice swirl pattern.

Here's my attempt at getting the swirl, but not really getting it....

 I put it in the oven anyways, wondering if the two batters would mix more while baking.

I baked it for 40 minutes and, since I also had trouble spreading it evenly in the pan, it cooked a little unevenly.  The top of the cream cheese portion browned a little in spots. 

It was tasty and the smell was so good that the brownies were cut long before it was completely cooled.  It's a good recipe - very, very sweet - but definitely not a good recipe for those concerned with their weights.