Juliet likes peanut butter again!
She wanted me to bake something with peanut butter, but I wasn’t in a cookie-making mood, what with all the pans going in and out every ten minutes and the fact that I’d just finished doing all the dinner dishes. Tomorrow I’ll make cookies, but today I wanted something that goes into the oven once and comes out when it’s done.
I showed her a bunch of different options from my Pinterest board and this is what she decided on: Pumpkin Peanut Butter Blondies.
I agree, it sounds like an odd combo. Also, it has white chocolate chips in it, but I just told Juliet they’re white chips because she claims not to like chocolate and refuses to eat it in baked goods. Dave and I told Nathaniel that he has to keep the secret too.
Dave ran out for a last-minute “white chip” run (Ghiradelli, please!) and Juliet & I assembled the ingredients.
Juliet also insisted that I take a picture of her usual starting position.
I creamed the butter (one stick) and brown sugar (3/4 cup) together with my beloved stand mixer.
While I was doing that, Juliet cutely but unhelpfully stacked some of the other ingredients.
This was all cute until the second time she did it, and ignored my request to stop. Some ill-chosen unstackables got involved and the next thing I knew, my tiny $8 bottle of vanilla was spilling across the floor, as well as onto my sock. I snapped at her, she cried, we made up, and went back to baking, this time agreeing on a stack-free experience.
I measured out the peanut butter and let her lick the spoon while I plopped it onto the pumpkin.
Juliet was fascinated by my egg separator. (Like mother, like daughter.) I didn’t let her crack the eggs this time because of the delicacy involved, but once the whites were ready, she got to pour them into the bowl.
Once the vanilla was in — thank goodness we had enough left — I let Juliet do the stirring. She did a pretty good job.
In yet another bowl, we got the dry ingredients together. I was happy I finally had a chance to use whole wheat pastry flour for the first time. I bought it a while back for a recipe I never ended up making, and wanted to know what it was like.
I ran out of pumpkin pie spice about half a teaspoon in, and compensated with a lot of cinnamon, and little bits of ginger, cloves, nutmeg, and cardamom.
We mixed the butter & sugar into the peanut butter & pumpkin.
We added the flour, and incorporated. I say “we”, but I’m pretty sure I’d already lost Juliet at that point, she was off in the playroom making “lunch” for me out of Legos and broken crayons.
Once everything was properly blended, I dumped in the White Chips. (shh)
Mixed it all together, and got it ready for baking. The recipe specified a baking dish, not a pan, but said nothing about size, so I had to wing it and opted for our Pyrex lasagna dish. It looked about right once I spread the batter across it as evenly as I could.
I put it in the oven and started the clean-up. Unfortunately I never found the cap to the vanilla.
Thirty minutes later, just before I got Juliet up to bed, it was done.
I thought the peanut butter & pumpkin combination would be weird, but it’s actually really good. The texture is nice — dense as a blondie should be — and the white chips add just the right touch of sweetness.
Unfortunately, Juliet took a look at it this morning and has zero interest. Yeah. Fortunately, Nathaniel and Dave both like it and I can take the bulk of it to work tomorrow.
Also unfortunately, I wrote a great blog entry for this last night, and then accidentally closed the browser window without saving it. It was a lot better than this one. Boo.
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