Red Velvet Cheesecake Brownies

First of all, THANK YOU to everyone who commented last week to help me celebrate my Blirthday! Or blogiversary as some of you like to call it :) I will be closing the giveaway today, and Patrick is going to help me choose the winners tonight! I am not using any fancy random number picker or anything-I think you guys deserve to have me write your name down on a piece of paper and toss it into a dirty John Deere hat to pick the winners. Now that's love :)

 I'll be announcing them first thing in the morning! Which means, 6:00 a.m. mountain time.

Now, onto the rest!

This weekend, we did another branding-this time it was our cows, my in-laws' cows and our grandparents' cows. When you host a branding, usually the ladies take care of the meal. My husband's grandma usually does up all of the food, but she is in Arizona right now so that left it up to myself and my MIL. We planned out for a couple weeks what we could do to make it easy. We decided on barbecue beef sandwiches, potato salad (my specialty!), green beans, fruit salad and a dessert.

I have previously posted the recipe I used for the BBQ beef sandwiches, which you can find HERE.

I'm not quite ready to part with my potato salad recipe on the world wide web, so you'll just have to wait for that one!

My sister and I also made the dessert....BEHOLD:

Red Velvet Cheesecake Brownies. All three of my favorite things, put into one bite. DELISH!

My thoughts? Well, it was pretty darn delicious, and I would absolutely make it again. I think my recipe ended up with a little bit more of the cheesecake on top than the picture, but hey, you won't find me complaining about that! My friends, this was a crowd-please. You should definitely use this recipe!

1. 1/2 cup butter
2. 2-oz dark chocolate, coarsely chopped
3. 1 cup sugar
4. 2 large eggs
5. 1 tsp vanilla extract
6. 1 1/2 teaspoon red food coloring
7. 2/3 cup all purpose flour
8. 1/4 teaspoon salt
9. 8-oz cream cheese, room temperature
10. 1/3 cup sugar
11. 1 large egg
12. 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Butter the bottom and sides of a 8 inch metal baking pan. Put a long piece of parchment paper in the bottom of the pan, letting the parchment extend up two sides of the pan and overhang slightly on both ends. (This will make it easy to remove the bars from the pan after they have baked.) Butter the parchment.
2. In a small, heatproof bowl, melt butter and chocolate together. Stir until combined and very smooth. Set aside to cool for a few minutes.
3. In a large bowl, whisk together sugar, eggs, vanilla extract and red food coloring. Add chocolate mixture and stir until smooth. Add flour and salt and stir until just combined and no streaks of dry ingredients remain.
4. Pour into prepared pan and spread into an even layer.
5. To prepare cheesecake mixture, beat cream cheese, sugar, egg and vanilla extract in a medium bowl until smooth. Distribute the cheesecake mixture in 8 dollops over batter in the pan. Swirl in with a knife or spatula.
6. Bake for 35-40 minutes, until brownies and cheesecake are set. A knife inserted into the cheesecake mixture should come out clean and the edges will be lightly browned.
7. Let cool completely in pan on a cooling rack before lifting out the parchment paper to remove the brownies.

Yields: 16 large brownies or 24 small brownies