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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Pumpkin Swirl Brownies


My most excellent place of employment recently went through an exercise to upgrade all of its employee workstations. I had forgotten about this until I noticed an appointment in my calendar for somebody from our IT department to come and take my old computer away and install a new one. What ensued was a mad scramble to rid my existing hard drive of anything and everything incriminating personal. I had a LOT of junk on there. But some of it wasn't junk, like this picture that I found of these Pumpkin Swirl Brownies that I made back in the fall and then completely forgot about.

So then I transfered the picture on to one of those little USB thingers, and forgot about THAT instead.

But yesterday, I was sitting in a meeting, and I remembered it! Can't remember the meeting very well though...

So here is the recipe. It was truly fabulous. These brownies were moist and rich and melt in your mouth (see no memory problems there!). I even remember where I got the recipe from: LCBO Food and Drink

One thing I really CANNOT remember, though, is how many of these little suckers I ate. So it must have been only one. Yeah. I'm sure it was only one!

Pumpking Swirl Brownies

Pumpkin Swirl
1 oz cream cheese, room temperature
1/4 cup sugar
1/2 cup mashed pumpkin
1 large egg
2 tbsp flour
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1/4 tsp cinnamon

Brownie
6 oz bittersweet chocolate, chopped
3 tbsp butter
1/2 cup sugar
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1/2 cup pastry flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

1. Preheat oven to 350F and grease an 8x8 inch square baking dish.

2. For pumpkin swirl, stir together the cream cheese and sugar. Add pumpkin and beat well. Blend in egg, pastry flour, vanilla and cinnamon. Set aside.

3. For brownies, place chocolate and butter in double boiler and stir until melted.

4. Remove from heat and stir in sugar, then vanilla, and then the eggs one at a time. Stir in flour, baking powder and salt.

5. Scrape half of batter into baking dish and spread evenly. Drop spoonfuls of pumpkin filling onto brownie batter and then drop remaining brownie batter around pumpkin. Swirl filling with tip of a knife and bake for about 30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center of the brownie comes out clean.

6. Cool at room temperature before slicing (makes 16 square or 20 smaller rectangular brownies).