cream cheese brownies
Yesterday afternoon I felt like baking. I’m not sure why; it was close to 80 degrees out and muggy as anything. But I wanted to make goodies to take to work, and I had some cream cheese that I’d meant to use for cupcake frosting but I didn’t get to make the cupcakes because I worked late the night I’d intended to bake. Of course I didn’t want to make cupcakes when it was 80 
degrees out — or at least, I didn’t want to make frosting, only to watch it melt — but I thought, surely somewhere in the books yet to be used I can find a recipe for cream cheese brownies.
You Deserve Dessert is another of those cookbooks from a cookbook club. I managed to accumulate several of these before I finally quit. They’re very pretty books, 
which makes them the more tempting to keep instead of mailing back. This book consists of recipes contributed by members, and as soon as I saw that I knew I was sure to find what I was looking for. Cream cheese brownies seem like a key part of a household baker’s repertoire — though I suppose that doesn’t explain why I’d never made them for myself before.
I started by buttering an 8×8-inch baking pan and then melting a stick of butter with two ounces of semisweet chocolate. I suspected this meant the brownies would be rather sweet, but I pressed on. I beat 8 ounces of softened cream cheese with 1/3 cup of sugar, an egg and 1/4 teaspoon of almond extract, and set that aside. In another bowl I beat the chocolate mixture with a 
cup of sugar and two eggs, then added a mixture of 3/4 cup of flour, 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon of salt.
I poured about half of the chocolate batter into my pan. Then I added the cream cheese mixture. The recipe says to spread it on top, but of course the mixture was just thick enough that I couldn’t quite spread it 
evenly. That was fine with me; one of the things I like about cream cheese brownies is the irregular marbling effect. Once I’d made sure that the cream cheese mixture was equitably if not uniformly distributed across the pan, I added the rest of the chocolate batter and poked at it a bit with a spatula to ensure more marbling. Then I put the pan into a 350-degree oven, swore loudly, 
pulled the pan out, sprinkled on roughly half a cup of chopped pecans, and put it back into the oven. I let it bake for about 40 minutes and then let it cool for a while before cutting it into squares.
The brownies were good but, as I suspected, rather sweet. I like contrast; I like a strong chocolate flavor tempered by a sweet 
batter, or a tart cream cheese flavor balanced against sugar. Both the chocolate part and the cream cheese part were distinctly sweet, and the pecans were unsalted, so didn’t offer much tang in contrast. Don’t get me wrong; they tasted good, and the people at work today certainly didn’t complain to me about the sweetness. But if I were to do this again I think I’d substitute one 
ounce of unsweetened chocolate for one of the ounces of semisweet and reduce the sugar in the cream cheese mixture a little. I could also use salted pecans, or perhaps I could sugar-glaze them and use half the sugar in the cream cheese part. Hmm.
But I’m not making them again until it cools down here. I haven’t checked the weather forecast, so I’m not sure if that means next week or next September, but I can wait.
Verdict: Success. Certainly worth trying again, if only to play around with the recipe a little.