About a month ago I handed the Tucos menus to my 18 year old son and 7 year old daughter. I got wonderful feedback and ideas from them. One of the ideas (from my daughter) was to serve some sort of peanut butter dessert. And so began the month long process of developing the dish. Peanut butter cookies? Boring. PB pudding? Yuk. I came across a recipe for a super-gooey brownie and tried it substituting peanut butter for the chocolate. The first try was baked in a 9 inch square pan and resulted in a delicious tasting brownie, but way too gooey in the center. The idea had potential but we needed to come up with a way to dail in the goo so it's just right. The solution came after several tries in different pans and we found a sort of square cupcake pan that produced an ideal, gooey brownie. Then came the challenge of how to turn a $2 brownie into an $8 dessert. A frosting? Too predictable. Stacking it with some sort of sauce? Yawn. Then I tried it with a scoop of our vanilla ice cream. Yum.... Now we had two moving parts decided on. What else do we do with it to take it over the top?
Everything fell into place when I thought about the combination of the brownie and ice cream and imagined it as a flavor at Ben & Jerry's. What's missing? A caramel sauce - a peanut butter caramel sauce. And some suger cone for crunch. Yes, that's right. Our dessert is basically a warped execution of a Ben & Jerry's ice cream on a sugar cone.
And it's delicious!
