Forget Peanut Butter: This Rich Swap Makes Boxed Brownies 10x More Flavorful

You might default to peanut butter chips and swirls to impart additional flavor to boxed brownie mix, but hear us out: There's another type of butter you can use as a decadent alternative. It's not made of nuts or fruit, and it's something we also love adding to our morning boxed pancakes. That would be cookie butter — Biscoff cookie butter, to be specific.

Biscoff is the Belgian brand of speculoos cookies you often get on airplanes as a little free snack, with a distinct, almost caramel-like flavor to them, along with an additional hint of warming spice. Biscoff cookie butter is a spread made with the crushed cookies, as well as oil, creating a nut butter-like paste that tastes intensely of the cookie itself. Rather than being as earthy as peanut butter, Biscoff has more of a cinnamon and toffee-like flavor that works perfectly with chocolate, which is why the cookie butter version plays so well with your preferred brownie mix.

You're probably wondering about the best way to add Biscoff butter to your brownie mix, and it's as easy as you'd imagine. If you're looking for the lowest-fuss version, you can simply mix a ½ cup of Biscoff cookie butter into your brownie batter or swirl it in. 

But you can also enhance these brownies by crushing up some actual Biscoff cookies (about 1½ cups worth) and mixing them with melted butter to create a cookie crust beneath the brownie batter. There's no need to pre-bake the crust (unlike some pie crusts), and if you're so inclined, you can swirl a little more cookie butter into the top of the batter before you bake it. 

You can also add even more crumbled Biscoff on top, though you may want to keep checking towards the end of the bake time in case they get a little too dark. If you're really looking to stick to the theme, Biscoff ice cream is even available in some freezer aisles (so you know what I'm hinting at). If you give this combination a try, you just may find yourself ditching the peanut butter brownies altogether.