Recipe - Microwave Peanut Butter Cake

I surely am enjoying the time off that I have but I also admit to being slightly stir crazy due to all of it. But when one gets this way, one cooks and starts to make plans to cook! I think my mother and I spent more then an hour yesterday on the phone deciding what and how to make dinners for both my up coming birthday as well as 2 days of cooking come Christmas time. We;re gonna do Christmas dinner 100% from scratch so this will be an interesting adventure. We're booting the 'boys' out (our husbands) for Christmas eve (my DH has to work anyhow) and going to go about making everything from our own condensed mushroom soup to fried onions (can you see where that is going??) to making home-made cornbread sage sausage stuffing to put into a big ol' turkey that we're gonna bake all Christmas day. Man oh man I can't wait! It's been so long since I had any family time much less doing something I loved to do when I was younger, cook with my mother.

I have realized with the time not working now, just exactly how much of my life I put on hold while I was working. I have a new pasta machine that is now 2yrs old, I have a French Macaroon kit that is over a year old and a number of molds/kits that have sat here since I had been working, opened but unused! On top of that, I haven't had a decent time at holiday time, or any other time to be honest, with my own family. The 2yrs that I did work over the holidays, I put everything aside to make sure my bosses had time with their family (they also have kids) instead. I just didn't do anything but work. I realize that so much now that it's almost enough to make me cry.

Sooooo today, it's again getting windy and cold and a perfect time to go about putting in a nice huge pot of American style beef stew! It's not a dish you can just throw together in an hour though! It needs a long slow stew in the oven (or a crock pot I would think) for at least 6hrs or longer if you have time for it. That is for another post though.

Sweet... must have something sweet and one of my biggest weaknesses, it always has been, is peanut butter + chocolate in any form. A while ago I started experimenting with the 'microwave cake' recipes that were running a muck on the web. I came up with my own peanut butter butter microwave cake with chocolate chips and it even includes an equally easy icing to go with. I've added this recipe to the 'first attempts' section because although it was good, the way I did it with my photos is the way the note mentions and not step by step. Next time, I will get photos while doing it properly step by step and show the difference.

Ingredients
 ♥ 2 Tbs GF flour
 ♥ 2 Tbs peanut butter (creamy or chunky, your choice)
 ♥ 1/2 tsp baking powder
 ♥ 1 Tbs brown sugar
 ♥ 1 Tbs dark/semi sweet chocolate chips
 ♥ 1 egg, lightly beaten
 ♥ 1 tsp milk
 ♥ 1 Tbs powdered sugar

Directions
In a small mixing bowl lightly mix the flour, baking powder, brown sugar together with a fork. Add chocolate chips and give a toss too coat them (it will help keep them mixed throughout instead of sinking to the bottom or floating to the top of the batter before it bakes enough to hold them).

Add peanut butter and egg and mix well. Pour mixture into greased ramekins or other suitable glass/ceramic container suitable for this amount of mixture plus a bit of rising room.

Microwave in 30 second bursts on high power. The same applies here as if you bake it, insert tooth pick in the middle and if it comes out clean it's baked.

While cake is microwaving, in a small bowl mix together the powdered sugar and milk. Add more powdered sugar if you want a thicker icing.

Remove cake from ramekin if you wish to and pour over the icing and eat! Enjoy!

Note ~ You can choose to mix everything together at once, except the milk and powdered sugar but if you want it to come out evenly with the chocolate chips throughout, follow the directions. My photos this time show what happens if you don't take the steps above, all the chocolate falls to the bottom.

First Attempt - Peanut Butter Chocolate Chip Bars

I want to make this blog not just 'another food blog', I want to make this a real life and true to form blog. We'll talk about food, recipes, mistakes that turn into disasters, mistakes that turn into wonderful new recipes like my veggie stew, about things that deal with gluten free life style that aren't just about food... heck I even have ideas about writing about some stuff that involved our pets!

Another of these ideas was that I would post my 'first attempts' at recipes or ideas. I won't post recipes with it yet but I will share my experience with it. There will be more first attempts posted and when the ones that succeed without needing to be changed or altered, I will include the recipe but for now this one although it did make the cut, there is still something not quite 100% to my liking and I want to experiment with it a bit more. With that said though, it won't be one I explore any time in the near future only because well lets face it, peanut butter + butter + baking = LOTS of calories and fat. So yea, I'll experiment with it again but much later.

This recipe came about because I just LOVE (did I mention LOOOOOOVE) peanut butter and chocolate. A couple of my favourite things when it comes to this are peanut butter cups (yea I have made these too so it'll be posted at some point!) and any thing that even comes close to peanut butter cookies. With this recipe, it takes all the work of waiting for cookies to bake every 10-15mins in god knows how many batches until the batter is gone. It all gets thrown into a cake pan and set to bake. I loved the idea so off I went!

My review so to speak of it is this. It's great that I don't have to wait for batch after batch to become finished because of the fact that they are bars and not cookies. I like the fact that they will all turn out the same look, texture and doneness simply because you won't have to watch each batch to ensure they are all the same. I don't know about you but when I make cookies, it always seem the oven just changes temps a bit too much to keep each batch of cookies cooked evenly... this annoys me especially when you get really under done ones or really over done ones and you didn't change a damn thing between sheets of cookies. The original recipe does call for an entire cup of peanut butter as well as 1 1/2 sticks of butter as you would expect from peanut butter cookies. That is the ONLY thing that puts me off this recipe to be honest. I LOVE cookies but I also don't like the fact that there is always so much damn fat in them unless you are purposely cooking/baking on the 'light' side of things... which hardly include cookies.... at least decent ones.

Now the side I found a bit down is even though followed to the ~T~ the recipe came out a bit dry and very crumbly. This is why I don't want to post it yet. I want to find what will make it a bit more moist and what will make it hold together better. I am pondering a bit more butter as a usual peanut butter cookie recipe calls for 2 sticks of butter and then I'm also pondering an extra egg to help bind it.

All in all though this is a keeper recipe. Crumbling and even a bit dry, me and my dear husband did still manage to finish the pan off in about 2days time (hangs her head in shame). Here is a photo of it just out of the oven. When I attempt it for the final showing, I'll be sure to get more photos as usual.