In which I tame the wild brownie.
I’ve had a devil of a time making brownies. In the last seven years, I’ve made many different recipes - including my mother’s trusty old one that I used as a child - and each time turned up brownies that were goopy in the middle and shatteringly brittle on top. Many people offered up opinions - wrong method, wrong pan, wrong oven - but nothing I changed seemed to make any difference.
Until last night, when - struck by a brownie craving - I found a recipe for Irish cream brownies. Studying the recipe, I noticed a few things clearly wrong with the method - things left out. Right. Well, I can fix that - and I stopped and wondered for a moment if my casual attitude towards recipes was going to get me into trouble. I decided it wasn’t, and proceeded.
The first, most obvious thing wrong - the eggs need to be beaten together with the vanilla before you try to incorporate them. Secondly, they need to be tempered before they are added to the hot mixture. That hardly even counts as recipe tampering, to my mind; it’s more like the person who wrote the thing down forgot something so basic and obvious. But it’s not obvious to everyone, and leaving steps like that out can result in tragedy.
I didn’t have a 10×15x1 pan, so I used my elderly 9.5×13.5×2, and increased the baking time to 25 minutes. When the brownies came out, they were soft and dark brown; I brushed the Irish cream over them and watched them turn glossy and nearly black. I rather felt that the glaze the recipe calls for would be gilding the lily, so instead I let them cool and ate some plain. They were delicately-textured, cakey but not sticky, with a tender crumb and a faint Irish cream scent.
Finally, I had conquered the elusive brownie! I did a dance of victory and had another…
October 3rd, 2004 at 8:34 pm
Mmmm. Those sound glorious.
I made my first chocolate cake from scratch recently — a devil’s food cake with fudge frosting, from the King Arthur Flour cookbook — and was delighted by how relatively easy it was and how tasty it turned out. No more mixes for me! :-)
October 3rd, 2004 at 8:57 pm
I made my first from-scratch cake back in June - also devil’s food. “Just as easy as a mix!” I thought to myself - but it’s really not, for a lot of people. You kind of need a base comfort level with cooking to feel that way.
But oh, so good….
Highly recommended: some cinnamon in the batter. Not much - a teaspoon or so. Gives it just a hint of spice.
October 4th, 2004 at 8:22 am
Two comments, really.
When it comes to premade brownie mixes, it’s hard to go wrong with No Pudge brownies, though I realize that is not the point of this post.
Second, I read recently that Gourmet Magazine used to have the not-tested-well recipe problems you describe, under the pretension that if you couldn’t interperet the recipe, what were you cooking for?