Posts Tagged ‘brownies’

I’ve picked up snowboarding now that I live so close to the mountains. Being a beginner means a lot of falling and unfortunately I took a particularly bad fall the most embarrassing way possible…

I hurt myself falling off of the chairlift.

With 3 out of 4 tendons of my rotator cuff injured, I was given the bad news of not snowboarding again until I healed up.

This disappointing information required a hefty dose of chocolate. I chose Robert’s Brownies My Way by Alice Medrich
because she uses the phrase “densely creamy and intensely bittersweet”. I didn’t find them intensely bittersweet, but these brownies are lightly sweetened and they are fudgy to a point where you think they haven’t been baked long enough. As long as the toothpick comes out mostly clean, you’re in the clear.

Recipe here.

For some strange reason I resisted getting The Art & Soul of Baking (do I really need another baking book?), but I’m glad I got a chance to use this book. It’s a great beginner book and for those more experienced. There’s a croissant recipe in there that I’d like to try one day.

I’ve made several of the recipes and most have turned out. The Lemon Mascarpone Cake didn’t turn out too well. The cake layers were thin and felt like frisbees. The recipe required a 9″ baking pan, but I have a feeling if I used an 8″ things would have worked out nicely. All the other recipes turned out fabulous.

Cheddar Cheese-Mustard loaf? This would make any plain chicken sandwich sing.

And you can’t go wrong with the caramelized onion and blue cheese pizza.

But the brownies…

These were decadent, fudgy, and so good. It’s the kind of thing I’d bake on a cool and crisp day. So comforting.

The Art & Soul of Baking is a book that’s not to be missed. I can think of at least 10 things off the top of my head that I’d like to try my hand at.

And the brownie recipe? You can get the low down on those (and the recipe) over at SweetHome.

I’ve been craving chocolate like crazy for the last while. I’ve been anxious lately and the anxiousness has been channeled into making chocolatey baked goods. I first made a self-saucing chocolate pudding which didn’t have the chocolate punch I was going for, so I turned to the book on chocolate, Alice Medrich’s Bittersweet.

The book goes into great detail about chocolate including the cocoa percentages, this site gives a good explanation. I believe cocoa percentages should be mandatory for all recipes now as there are so many different kinds of chocolate floating around. We’re not just dealing with Baker’s chocolate anymore. Using the same amount of butter and sugar for a chocolate that is 80% cocoa will yield much different results from one that is 50-60%. What I really like about this book is that she gives substitutions if you don’t have a certain percentage available. So if you have a 70% chocolate when you only need a 50%, she’ll give directions on how to work with it.

The level of difficulty varies. I would say it could be used by a beginner as this was the book that really got me into baking. This book is also suitable for the more advanced and I’ve grown with this book. The first recipe I made were bittersweet decadence cookies — powerful cookies that will make your knees weak. When my sister requested a chocolate cake for her baby shower, I turned to this book. It was my first complicated multiple layer cake complete with a ganache glaze. While it didn’t look quite as elegant as the picture in the book, it got rave reviews. I did like the extra ego boost when I overheard someone say “This is the best cake I’ve ever eaten in my entire life.”

With my chocolate craving, I was looking for something deep and chocolately, something that could satisfy with a few bites. Enter classic cocoa brownies.

I’ve never been able to get a smooth consistency when mixing the batter. It’s supposed to smooth, but mine always ends up looking like this:

Grainy and gross.

But they always end up turning out like the picture up at the top. These brownies actually lasted for awhile in our household because a little goes a long way.

This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn more about chocolate. If you’re a fan of the cocoa bean, I suggest you pick this up.

Recipe for brownies here

Ever since I’ve started shopping at Costco, processed foods have started to look so appealing to me.  I’m not into prepared snacks or foods, but I think the free sampling has gotten to me.  Every time I shop there, I pass the giant big box of Ghirardelli Triple Chocolate Brownie mix and I want to buy them.  Sure I can make brownies, but I was curious as to how the box mix would taste after doing some Googling and all I found were rave reviews.  I also managed to convince my neighbour to buy this gigantic box even before I made the mix.  She found them overly sweet and I was a bit disappointed I bought them.

I finally was able to borrow a pan so I could bake these suckers.  Knowing that my neighbour found the mix sweet, I decided to experiment and sprinkled fleur de sel on half of the mixture before I put it in the oven.  Maybe by doing this would cut the sweetness a bit.  I erred on the cautious side and took them out when they were underdone and put them on a cooling rack.  It rested for about 20 minutes before Movie Man couldn’t wait any longer and he tried to cut into them.  It was a mess!  

Our neighbours invited us over for dinner which of course was a perfect time for brownies, but it was still hard to get them to peel off the parchment paper cleanly without it crumbling.  I needed a Plan B.  All of my fancy glassware is wrapped up and packed so I took my glass tupperware container and made a pseudo trifle: a layer of brownies crumbled, a layer of whipped cream (left over whipping cream and put in my Magic Bullet), another layer of brownies and whipped cream, and a dusting of cocoa powder.  Success!

I have to admit the brownies are pretty good.  They are a bit sweet, but definitely not too sweet.  I liked it with a bit of fleur de sel sprinkled on top of it.  And they were pretty amazing with whipped cream and would be perfect crumbled into ice cream.  I can say that I’m not ashamed to be using mix from a box.