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Recipe: Brownies
Jan. 10th, 2020 09:03 pmWhat brownies?
I recently tried King Arthur Flour's Quick and Easy Fudge Brownies with only 1 1/4 cups sugar instead of 1 3/4 cups, as calculated per their article Reduce Sugar in Cookies and Bars. This was delicious and chocolaty and not too cakey like some brownies are. They were also a bit crumbly, but I forgot to add the sugar until the very end, so I'm hoping that adding it at the proper time might work better.
Cookie experiment
I also tried an experiment. Our local public library has a game night once a month and they have prepackaged snacks, but I'd like to bring better snacks so long as they are not messy. Since it was one day past my birthday, I thought some kind of cake thing would be good, but cake is messy. So I got the idea to scoop brownie batter onto a cookie sheet as if they were cookies, hoping they would become tiny one-bite delicious brownie-type things into which I could press some festive colored sprinkles.
Sadly, they did not work well. I did one cookie sheet full, and they spread out (they might not have had I refrigerated the batter first) and then were too crumbly (again, perhaps because I waited too long to add the sugar). They did taste pretty good. But I put the rest of the batter into a square pan to make regular brownies, which I did not bring, because they were too messy.
I tried googling whether this would work but only found cookie recipes based on brownie mixes. The pictures did look like tiny cookie-shaped brownies, so this could still be something I could develop in the future once I know what you normally have to add to brownie mixes to make brownies and so I can see how that differs from what these recipes said to do. But I probably won't do that.
Other departures from the recipe
Besides using less sugar, I also used whole wheat pastry flour instead of the all-purpose or gluten-free flours mentioned, I did not use espresso powder, and my eggs were jumbo rather than large.
Conclusion
I already had a great brownie recipe (Cynthia Doolittle's Bribery Brownies, for those who were already hanging with me in 1985), but it involves baker's chocolate, which is hard to find shade-grown, though I did finally see some recently.
I've also tried lower-fat brownie recipes and they all turned out cakey and therefore unacceptable. (One minor exception: subbing peanut butter for some of the butter works.)
So I'm now officially switching to this recipe.
I recently tried King Arthur Flour's Quick and Easy Fudge Brownies with only 1 1/4 cups sugar instead of 1 3/4 cups, as calculated per their article Reduce Sugar in Cookies and Bars. This was delicious and chocolaty and not too cakey like some brownies are. They were also a bit crumbly, but I forgot to add the sugar until the very end, so I'm hoping that adding it at the proper time might work better.
Cookie experiment
I also tried an experiment. Our local public library has a game night once a month and they have prepackaged snacks, but I'd like to bring better snacks so long as they are not messy. Since it was one day past my birthday, I thought some kind of cake thing would be good, but cake is messy. So I got the idea to scoop brownie batter onto a cookie sheet as if they were cookies, hoping they would become tiny one-bite delicious brownie-type things into which I could press some festive colored sprinkles.
Sadly, they did not work well. I did one cookie sheet full, and they spread out (they might not have had I refrigerated the batter first) and then were too crumbly (again, perhaps because I waited too long to add the sugar). They did taste pretty good. But I put the rest of the batter into a square pan to make regular brownies, which I did not bring, because they were too messy.
I tried googling whether this would work but only found cookie recipes based on brownie mixes. The pictures did look like tiny cookie-shaped brownies, so this could still be something I could develop in the future once I know what you normally have to add to brownie mixes to make brownies and so I can see how that differs from what these recipes said to do. But I probably won't do that.
Other departures from the recipe
Besides using less sugar, I also used whole wheat pastry flour instead of the all-purpose or gluten-free flours mentioned, I did not use espresso powder, and my eggs were jumbo rather than large.
Conclusion
I already had a great brownie recipe (Cynthia Doolittle's Bribery Brownies, for those who were already hanging with me in 1985), but it involves baker's chocolate, which is hard to find shade-grown, though I did finally see some recently.
I've also tried lower-fat brownie recipes and they all turned out cakey and therefore unacceptable. (One minor exception: subbing peanut butter for some of the butter works.)
So I'm now officially switching to this recipe.