You know, I wasn’t going to give this a five star rating until day 2. NOW it’s five star. Don’t get me wrong, I love peanut butter, so much that I eat it every day for breakfast. But I rarely bake with peanut butter – no idea why not, it’s just not been a popular ingredient in my recipe repertoire. But this cake, day two, wow. And day one was not too shabby.
I am not finding it on her website, but it came from her cookbook, Sally’s Baking Addiction (pg 73). This is a dense but delicious peanut butter cake that is one layer and doesn’t rise much, topped with a very thick, very fudge-like chocolate frosting (the recipe makes more than you need for the cake, so you end up with some yummy leftover to use on something else). You do have to be careful not to overcook the cake (pay attention to her note to cover the cake half way through the baking so it doesn’t brown too much); I also needed 8-9 TB of heavy cream in the frosting vs. her 6TB. Use a good quality cocoa powder (note, I recently learned that Dutch Processed Cocoa and Natural Cocoa are totally different and really not interchangeable in recipes, although I’m sure I’ve done it before) – good article at https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/types-of-cocoa-powder-recipes-article. Like I said, day 2 is amazing. (Next time I wouldn’t grid the drizzled peanut butter and simply stripe it I think).
