chocolate cream cheese brownies

OK, so I promised my piano students a treat if they met their practice goal each week of the month, and the person who had the most practice minutes could get double treat - trying to motivate them to practice without it being totally their mom's job. I was hoping it would work well since I have 3 boys 10-11 years old. Working on a bit of healthy competition linked to their stomachs. Anyway, it didn't work as well as I hoped, but it did leave me without brownies on the day of lessons so I grabbed the old Betty crocker cookbook and picked pretty much the first brownie recipe. Wow, were they good. I think I ended up eating half of them. (OK, probably not really since all of my boys got one, and my students got one, plus one person got 2, but still, I had too many. Then I had to run 6 miles today.) Good thing I'm only making treats once a month for lessons.

Ingredients

• 1 6-ounce package (1 cup) semisweet chocolate pieces
• 2 Tablespoons butter
• 1/2 cup all purpose flour
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 eggs
• 1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup chopped pecans (originally walnuts, but I had pecans.)
• 1 3 oz. package of cream cheese, softened
• 1 beaten egg

Directions

Preheat oven to 350.
Grease and lightly flour an 8X8X2 inch baking pan. Melt chocolate and butter; cool. Stir together flour, baking powder, adn 1/4 teaspoon salt. In a mixer bowl beat 2 eggs and 1 teaspoon vanilla; gradually add 3/4 cup of the sugar. Continue beating eggs till thick and lemon colored. Add dry ingredients to egg mixture; beat till well combined. Stir in chocolate mixture; stir in nuts. Beat cheese and remaining 1/4 cup sugar till fluffy. Stir in remaining egg and 1/2 teaspoon valnilla. Spread half of the chocolate mixtuer in pan. Pour cheese mixture over; top with remaining chocolate mixture. Swirl layers to marble if desired. Bake 45 minutes. Cool. Cut into bars (makes 16)

This chocolate mixture was quite thick. Don't know if I should have used other chocolate (I just used chips) but it made for a thick mix. It was kind of hard to spread, but doable on the bottom of the pan. The cheese mix was really runny, so spreading the chocolate on top of that was pretty messy. It needed to be swirled to hide the mess. I wondered about it and hoped they would turn out. They did. Wonderful brownies.