Mini Dulce de Leche Brownies

On occasion, I am wary of my own opinion of my food because although I know what I like and don't like, sometimes I wonder if I have such odd tastes or a warped palate that I am the only person who finds my food palatable. It's true that I do enjoy some unusual foods and odd combinations; as far as food goes, I have very few hard-and-fast dislikes.

Now, family and close friends like my food, and often ask me about recipes or for cooking and baking tips. My offers to bring a dish to pass to a potluck are rarely refused, and invitations to dinner at my house are usually greeted with enthusiasm, maybe it's that I always have good booze, though, who knows? However, these people also love me and have some fixed notion in their heads that I am a good cook, so I often wonder if they might not be biased in my favor at the start or if it's like some sort of perception, "Babs is a good cook so this must be Good Food even if it tastes odd."

I brought some of these to work a few weeks ago, and as I may have mentioned, they were gone by lunchtime. One of my co-workers told me, and this is a direct quote in case the 3 people reading this get to accusing me of immodesty, "Those are about the best brownies I've ever had. If there are any left at the end of the day, I'm going to take them home."

I'm not kidding, on the inside, I did a little *squee* of excitement, while on the outside, I was attempting to be all gracious and casual: "Oh, really? I'd be happy to share the recipe if you like."


So, some validation can be a good thing. I guess my palate is NOT cracked. :)

But fear not, lest you think I'm going to get a huge head, I know that taste is subjective. No doubt there are folks out there - namely those who prefer a tall, cakey  brownie - for whom these brownies would NOT be the be-all and end-all.

The rest of you might want to give this recipe a whirl, though.

Mini Dulce de Leche Brownies

Makes 24 miniature brownies

Ingredients:

• 1/4 cup All-Purpose flour
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• pinch of salt
• 4 T salted butter
• 1 T heavy cream
• 5 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped
• 1/2 cup granulated white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1/2 t vanilla extract
• 1/2 cup dulce de leche, store bought or homemade, La Lechera is a good brand

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 325 and spray your mini brownie pan or mini muffin pan with cooking spray.
2. Mix together the flour, cocoa powder and salt in a small bowl.
3. Put the butter and sugar in the top of a double boiler over simmering water. Once the butter starts to melt, add the cream and chopped chocolate and melt. Stir to keep the mixture from scorching.
4. When the mixture has all melted, remove from heat and let cool. Add the vanilla extract and beaten egg and stir to mix well.
5. Add the dry ingredients to the melted chocolate and stir to make sure it is all well-incorporated.
6. Drop a small teaspoon of the batter into the prepared wells of your brownie pan, then add a teaspoon of the dulce de leche  and swirl it together slightly, then top with more brownie batter.
7. Bake for 15 - 20 minutes or until done. I always test with a cake tester. I also tend to under cook brownies slightly, so if a few bits of moist brownie are still clinging to my cake tester or toothpick when I test the brownies, that's ok by me.

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A teaser: Dulce de Leche Brownies

What have I been up to lately?

Baking.

Oh, and work, and cleaning. The ceiling of my art studio caved in a few weeks ago thanks to all of this God-awful rain, so I've also been paying for a new section of roof.

I felt the need for Crisis Brownies, so I baked some and brought them in to work, where they were devoured rather quickly.

Recipe to come soon. :)

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Dark Chocolate Espresso Brownie Bites

The concept and title of this blog revolves around comfort food. Food can be classed as comfort food either because of the warm-n-fuzzy memories we have associated with it or because of an almost therapeutic effect it has on us, whether it's like a chemical addiction for a bona fide carboholic, or the actual cathartic process of making it, like anger-management bread-dough therapy.

Crisis Brownies, the food, arose because, put simply, sometimes there are just those occasions that are so harrowing and stressful - like a break-up or extreme PMDD - that you need a fudgy, deeply intense, dark chocolate brownie. You may need just one; you may feel as though you have to eat half the batch straight from the pan. Whatever, why waste that burning need on something from a box when you can melt the best quality chocolate you can find and use real butter?

I love adapting and tinkering with this recipe to try out various flavor combinations and create different textures - by far, I prefer fudgy, dense and moist to cakey, but that's just me. I also prefer dark chocolate brownies that border on bittersweet to those that use milk chocolate. This is the first time I made them into miniatures by baking them in a mini-muffin tin. You end  up with what is the perfect mouthful of  brownie. Very satisfying.

I had wanted to top these with an espresso glaze or ganache, but when I ate my first tester brownie after I'd taken the out of the tins, I realized that these need nothing else except maybe a tall, cold glass of something milk-like whether it's milk, soymilk or almond milk. They are the perfect dark chocolate morsel.

Dark Chocolate Espresso Brownie Bites

Makes 16 mini brownies

Ingredients:

• 1 T espresso powder
• 1/4 cup All-Purpose flour
• 1/4 cup cocoa powder
• 1/3 cup turbinado sugar
• 3 T salted butter
• 1 T strong brewed coffee
• 6 oz. semisweet chocolate
• 1/4 t vanilla
• 1 egg at room temperature, beaten

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees Fahrenheit. Grease 2 mini muffin tins with butter, shortening or cooking spray - I filled up one whole 12-muffin tin and had enough batter to make four more in another tin.
2. In a small bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa powder and espresso powder with a whisk. Make sure to break up any clumps of cocoa powder.
3. In the top of a double boiler, gently heat the butter, sugar and coffee until the butter starts to melt. 
4. Add the chocolate and as it starts to melt, stir with a baking spatula. Once most of the chocolate has melted, take the top of the double boiler off the heat and keep stirring until it has all melted and is well mixed. Let it cool for about 5 minutes.
5. Add the vanilla extract to the chocolate mixture. Once the chocolate has come down in temperature to the point where you don't burn yourself when you stick your finger into the mix to test it, add the beaten egg and stir well.* See Notes
6. Add the dry ingredients to the chocolate and stir well. 
7. Scoop the batter by spoonful into the muffin tins to fill the about 2/3 full. I had enough for 16 mini muffins.
8. Bake for 15-20 minutes or until a toothpick comes out fairly clean. I usually underbake them slightly.
9. Let cool in the muffin tins for about 45 minutes before turning them out.

Notes:

• Usually when incorporating eggs into hot liquids, you'll want to temper them by adding a tiny bit of the hot liquid to the beaten eggs and whisking it pretty vigorously to raise the temperature of the egg, then you add that to the rest of the hot liquid mixture and keep whisking. This is so that that the egg won't curdle immediately upon meeting the hot mixture. No one wants scrambled eggs in gougeres, custards or brownies, right?
• It's worth noting that the magical temperature at which egg starts to curdle is 175 F. Sometimes when I am dealing with a pretty thick liquid mixture, like the chocolate mess with these brownies, it is a pain in the ass to use it to temper the eggs. Sometimes I'll scrape the chocolate mixture into a bowl nested in an ice water bath and let it cool before adding the eggs. The problem with that technique is that if it cools too far and you add the egg and try to stir it in, the chocolate mixture is grainy and won't accept the egg as well.
• That's when I decided to check the temperature manually. I've been making these for so long this way that I can tell by feel when the chocolate is cool enough but not too cool. It is important to stir the chocolate as it cools so that it is a uniform temperature with no blazing hot spots in there just waiting to curdle the eggs.

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Dark Chocolate Coconut Brownies

I've been absent thanks to a new full-time job, so I no longer have the luxury of indulging in meals that take hours to prepare. I have been seriously into baking lately - mostly on the weekends - and today, though we had those marvelous crèmes brûlées yesterday, I had a serious craving for chocolate, so I whipped up a batch of the Crisis Brownies, but with a few modifications: coconut extract and flaked coconut instead of vanilla and nuts, and the Dutch-process cocoa.

Very good, very deep and intense, these are not cakey or milk-chocolatey.I needed a full glass of milk after one small brownie, bit wow, did it hit the chocolate craving square in the face.

Dark Chocolate Coconut Brownies

Ingredients:

• 1/2 cup all-purpose flour, sifted
• 1/2 cup Dutch-process cocoa powder
• 1/2 cup turbinado sugar
• 1/4 cup dark brown sugar
• 6 T cold, unsalted butter, cut into large, 1-T pieces
• 2 T heavy cream
• 8 oz. unsweetened chocolate
• 4 oz. bittersweet chocolate
• 1/2 t coconut extract
• 2 large eggs at room temperature
• ½ cup chocolate chunks
• 1/4 cup flaked sweetened coconut

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 325 F and spray an 11 x 7 inch baking pan with cooking spray.
   
2. In a small bowl, mix together the flour and cocoa with a whisk to break up any clumps of cocoa.
   
3. Bring about 1 ½ inches of water to a boil in the bottom of your double boiler; reduce heat and then in the top pan of the double boiler heat the butter and sugar until the butter starts to melt, add the heavy cream, and then gradually add your chocolate, stirring constantly to be sure that the mixture doesn't burn.
4. Once the chocolate is all melted, add the coconut extract and then remove from the heat immediately and scrape into a large bowl.
   
5. Set this bowl inside a larger bowl which has some ice water in it and let the chocolate mixture cool before adding the eggs.Or you can temper the eggs by whisking in a bit of the chocolate mixture while it is still pretty hot.
6. Add the eggs, mixing well.
   
7. Gradually stir in the flour mixture and mix until smooth. add the chocolate chunks and flaked coconut and mix well.
   
8. Spread the batter into prepared pan.This is not a loose, pourable batter like some recipes - this is thick, almost like cookie dough. Don't worry. It's supposed to be like that.
   
9. Bake 25 minutes until a toothpick jabbed into the center comes out clean. This recipe makes very dense, moist and fudgy brownies.
   
10. Transfer pan to a rack to cool before cutting the brownies.
    

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Brownies

I made some changes to my Crisis Brownies recipe.

They are really good. Fudgey, chocolatey, gooey.

MMMM.

I'll add the new recipe soon.

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Cookie-Palooza is Coming!

I've been busy with other things the past few weeks, though if really pressed, I can't even recall what they were. Scratch that, I remember now: I hosted a big birthday event for my youngest. I made a ton of food and took pictures of none of it. I'm bad. It was tasty though.

I can say that I've spent the past week or so planning Cookie-Palooza. I used to make Christmas goodies to give to people, but fell out of the habit much the same way I fell out of the Christmas card habit. This year I'd like to change all that, and what better way than by baking 3 - 4 dozen of 10 different kinds of cookies?

It's ambitious, I know. Also slightly insane, but that's how I do things.

Today I'm having a mini-birthday to-do for the same birthday kid as last weekend because my sister couldn't make it the first time around. Since we devoured the gigantic ice cream cake days ago, today I'm making a pan of my favorite brownies: the eponymous Crisis Brownies.

I call them Crisis Brownies not because of any exotic addition of vitamin THC or anything, but because sometimes when you're in the throes of a crisis, you just need something super-chocolatey.

These brownies fit the bill.

Babs's Crisis Brownies

Ingredients:

• ¾ cup all purpose flour, sifted
  
• ¼ cup cocoa powder
  
• ¼ teaspoon baking soda
  
• ¾ cup granulated sugar
  
• 6 T cold, unsalted butter, cut into large, 1-T pieces
  
• 2 T heavy cream
• 12 oz (at least) semi-sweet chocolate
• 1 t vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• ½ cup chocolate chunks (optional)
• ½ cup chopped nuts (optional)

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 325 and spray an 11 x 7 inch baking pan with cooking spray.
   


2. In a small bowl, mix together the flour, cocoa and baking soda with a whisk to break up any clumps of cocoa.


3. Bring about 1 ½ inches of water to a boil in the bottom of your double boiler; reduce heat and then in the top pan of the double boiler* heat the butter and sugar until the butter starts to melt, add the heavy cream, and then gradually add your chocolate, stirring constantly to be sure that the mixture doesn't burn. Burnt chocolate makes the angels weep.
   
   The chocolate can be morsels, blocks or squares, and in my book, the more the better. I usually use a mixture of various semi-sweet chocolates.
   
   *If you don't have a double boiler, you can make your own by placing a stainless steel, glass or ceramic bowl over a saucepan of simmering water.
   


4. Once the chocolate is all melted, add the vanilla extract and then remove from the heat immediately and scrape into a large bowl.
   


5. Set this bowl inside a larger bowl which has some ice on the bottom and let the chocolate mixture cool.
   
   Before adding the eggs, you can test the temperature of the chocolate mixture like I do, by sticking a clean finger into the mix and tasting it. You kill two birds with one stone this way because you can also test how sweet the mixture is. Win-win.
   


6. Add the eggs, mixing well.
   


7. Gradually stir in the flour mixture and mix until smooth. Now you can add extras like chopped nuts or, my favorite, more chocolate.
   
   I usually use about 10-12 of some wonderful Belgian dark chocolate truffles chopped coarsely.
   


8. Pour batter into prepared pan.


9. Bake 25-35 minutes until a toothpick jabbed into the center comes out clean. This recipe makes very dense, moist and fudgy brownies.


10. Transfer pan to a rack to cool before cutting the brownies.
    


11. If you serve them warm with ice cream you will thank me.

Notes:

1. These brownies may be a lot of work, what with the double boiler and all, but they are worth every lick of effort.


2. Even made with generic store brand semi-sweet chocolate morsels, this recipe blows away any boxed mix brownies you could make; when made with more expensive baking chocolate, they will bring tears to your eyes.
   


3. I believe that if you doubled the eggs in the recipe, you'd end up with a lighter, airier, cake-like brownie, if that's your thing. I am firmly in the dense, moist and fudge-like brownie camp, so I stick to just the 2 eggs.
   
   Don't get me wrong, cake has its place, but when I want a brownie, I want it to be somewhere in the territory between cake and fudge.
   

A closer look at the deep, fudgy moistness.

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