Chocolate chip cheesecake brownies!

Once I got the idea of making my gram's brownies in my head, it wouldn't let up. That led to heading out to good old Trader Joe's for cream cheese, the only ingredient I didn't have. These were surprisingly easy to make, though they do taste a little different than my grandmom's. I'm pretty sure she didn't bother to
use fat-free cream cheese and sugar substitute :) Well, at least I can feel better about pigging out this time around.



I had to make two separate batters. One for the brownies which included melted chocolate chips and butter rather than just throwing cocoa powder in the mix. What a difference!

Then I whipped up the cheesecake batter. Again, pretty straightforward. I don't post recipes here, though I probably will if I got a fanbase going or joined a blogging group. Right now it feels tedious, and I have too much else to do thanks to school. The cheesecake had quite a tang to it.

Finally, I married the two batters and they seemed very happy together. You dollop the cheesecake onto the brownie batter in a square pan when you're ready to bake. We have no square pan, so I improvised. If I had used my brownie pan, I wouldn't have had enough batter to fill it and the brownies would have been thin and gross. I took the bread pan we have and placed it inside the edge of the pan so as to block any batter spillage. This kept the brownies baking in a pseudo-square shape. What can I say, I'm the Macgyver of bake ware  I then swirled the dollops of cheesecake into the brownie batter. I think I over swirled because my grandmom's had larger chunks of cream cheese than mine did. And finally, the chocolate chips. The icing on the cake, in my opinion.

The final product! These are pretty darn close to the original, but I took a healthier route and the taste is slightly different. Ah well. Not bad for a first go!