Ingredients

Brownie batter:

  • 170 grams (1½ sticks) unsalted butter
  • 90g grams dark chocolate (7 pieces Trader Joe’s Pound Plus Dark Chocolate1)
  • 255 grams granulated sugar
  • 150 grams (3 large) eggs
  • 3 grams (½ teaspoon) fine salt
  • 30g grams black cocoa powder, 30g dutched cocoa powder2
  • 65 grams all-purpose flour
  • 113 grams (10 single-stuff) Oreo cookies

Cheesecake middle layer:

  • 225 grams (1 box) cream cheese, softened
  • 30 grams powdered sugar
  • 18 grams (1 large) egg yolk
  • 2 grams (½ teaspoon) vanilla extract

Instructions

  1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a 9x9 glass pan with parchment paper. Set the cream cheese out to soften. To split the brownie batter in half more precisely, weigh the medium pot, that you’ll make the brownie batter in.
  2. Brown the butter: melt the 1½ sticks of butter in a medium pot, stirring and scraping the bottom until it stops bubbling and starts to turn brown3
  3. Take the pot off the stove and add the chocolate. Stir. The heat from the butter will melt the chocolate.
  4. Mix/whisk in the 255g sugar, 3g salt, and 60g of cocoa powder Once cool enough to touch, mix in the 3 eggs one at a time. Continue mixing until smooth then fold in the 65g flour.
  5. Par-bake the base: put approximately half of the brownie mixture into the lined baking dish. Bake for 20 mins4, just until the surface is mostly solid.
  6. Put the cream cheese, 1 egg yolk, 30g powdered sugar, and 1½ teaspoon vanilla into a bowl
  7. Scrape the Oreo’s filling into the bowl, putting the cookie tops and bottoms into a plastic bag. Crush the cookies into crumbs using a rolling pin.
  8. Mix the filling until smooth. Scoop the filling over the par baked base and smooth it into a flat layer using a spatula. Chill the base + the filling for 20 minutes, just until the filling starts to stiffen.
  9. Put dollops of the remaining brownie batter over the top of the filling, then flatten it out as much as possible. Pour the cookie crumbs over the top, then flatten them out + press them a bit so they stick.
  10. Bake for 35 minutes4, checking with a toothpick or sharp knife towards the end until it comes out with minimal batter or completely clean.
  11. Let cool for at least 2 hours refrigerated before cutting and serving.

Variants

You can mix up the cheesecake filling to emulate different kinds of Oreo. Mostly I’ll leave this as an exercise for the reader, though I’ll put variations I’ve tested below.

Mint:

  • 1 teaspoon peppermint extract instead of vanilla
  • 2 drops of green food coloring in the cheesecake filling
  • mint oreos instead of regular oreos (probably unnecessary, the mint extract will overpower the flavor of the filling)

Notes

I had a brownie like this at the airport. It was so delicious (or maybe I just really hungry) that I barely had any left when I realized that I wanted to take a picture of it. A tiny bit of the original airport brownie.

I haven’t seen a similar sandwich brownie recipe, though there are numerous recipes for marbled brownies or brownies that embed whole Oreos. The very first version of this recipe was generated by Claude Opus 5; I’ve tested it (at least) 3 times since, and heavily edited the ingredients + instructions.

The resulting brownie is a fair bit more cheesecake forward than what I originally tried to recreate, but in a way that I think is probably better. A mint version of the brownie

  1. Any dark chocolate is probably fine, this is just my favorite baking chocolate. https://www.traderjoes.com/home/products/pdp/pound-plus-72-cacao-dark-chocolate-048875 ↩

  2. You can use different kinds of cocoa powder, black cocoa powder is the most oreo like and tastes less chocolatey. My favorite is a 50/50 blend of dutched/black cocoa like King Arthur’s Double Dark Cocoa Powder. 100% dutched cocoa powder will be nearly identical and is easy to find at any grocery store. ↩

  3. The first time I did this I thought I burnt my butter but it tasted fine. Most important thing is to remove all the water from the bubble, don’t sweat this step too much. ↩

  4. I’m suspicious my oven may be too cold, and have only tested in a single oven. Err on the side of checking earlier/more often, especially on the final bake. ↩ ↩2