M&M Double Decker Brownies

I recently did some recipe clean out.  I purged both my recipe card box and print out file folder.  I had several recipe cards I had received when I got married that I had never made and recipe print outs from websites that I tried once and didn't like enough to repeat.  It was a fun trip down memory lane, especially the recipe cards.  I got lots of great treasured recipes when I got married tucked into shower gifts, but there were some that were just not my sort of food.  I'm from the Midwest, where mayonnaise based lettuce salads are not just normal, but celebrated.  For a great representation for how hard it is to explain these recipes to people on the East Coast and how hard it is to explain to people from the Midwest why these are considered odd elsewhere, watch the Thanksgiving episode on the first season of How I Met Your Mother.  Even just thinking about it makes me giggle.  But as usual, I digress.  I had snacks at church the same week I did my recipe clean out, so it prompted me to make two old recipes I hadn't had in a long time, and one new one that I had had for years and just never made.  This M&M brownie recipe was very good and disappeared quickly.  It's really more like cookie bars than the texture of brownies.

1 1/2 sticks butter

1 cup sugar

1 cup brown sugar

3 large eggs

1 teaspoon vanilla

2 1/2 cups all purpose flour, divided

2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder

1 teaspoon salt

1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1 Tablespoon butter, melted

1 cup M&M's mini baking bits, divided (I couldn't find these, so just used regular plain M&Ms)

Preheat oven to 350.  Grease a 9x13 pan.  In a large mixing bowl, cream butter and sugars until light and fluffy; beat in eggs and vanilla.  In a seperate bowl, combine 2 1/4 cups (reserve the remaining 1/4 cup for later) flour, baking powder and salt.  Blend dry ingredients into butter and sugar.  Divide batter in half.  

Blend together the cocoa powder and the melted butter and then stir into one half of the batter.  This will be the bottom layer.  Spread evenly into the bottom of your greased pan.  This is a little tricky because it's the consistency of stiff cookie dough.

With the remaining batter, stir in the remaining 1/4 cup of flour, and 1/2 cup of the M&Ms.  Try to spread this second layer as evenly as possible over the first chocolate layer.  Again, a bit tricky.  Sprinkle the top with the other 1/2 cup of M&Ms.  Bake 25 to 30 minutes or until the edges start to pull away from the pan.