It is holiday baking season! While I am definitely proficient at both cooking and baking, I am not a master chef and so usually abstain from posting food prep/recipe posts, I felt that this particular experience deserved to be shared.
Last night, in my kitchen, was the Brownie Apocalypse.
It started out innocently enough. I had been browsing around, finding fun new things to try this Christmas, and stumbled upon (saw in my Google reader feed) this little gem from The Pioneer Woman. I thought, "This will be the perfect little addition to our usual goodies." Foolish, foolish girl.
After purchasing the proper ingredients and bringing them home I began my work. Melting the chocolate went surprisingly well, which was a fortunate surprise, since usually I have the darndest time trying to get chocolate to melt properly. Nevertheless, this time it went (ahem) smoothly, and by the time I had finished I had a respectable looking brownie batter. I scooped it into a well-greased mini-muffin tin, and put it into the oven. I even remembered to set the actual timer like a responsible cook. (Most times I just eyeball it, which, to be fair, has only ended in disaster a couple times.) After spending 14 minutes reading a trashy romance novel (when I should have been starting the clean-up process), I took 24 perfect-looking miniature brownies out of the oven. They looked fabulous and smelled divine.
Until I tried to "flip the cooled pan over and let them finish on a cooling rack" per Pioneer Woman's instructions. I flipped the pan over, but nothing happened. So I shook it a little bit. One brave little brownie bite plopped out and landed smoothly on the cooling rack. So, after a few minutes of fruitlessly trying to twist my metal muffin tin to make the brownies vacate their cups, I resigned myself to having to use a knife to try to pry them out of the tin to which they were so obstinately clinging. The flaw in this cunning plan was that these are decadent, gooey, delightful brownies. Meaning the second a utensil is inserted in their near vicinity, they collapse like undercooked soufflé. Such was my luck in this very instance.
Out of a recipe that is meant to make something like 60 brownie bites, I managed to extract 17 respectable looking ones that I felt deserved to move on to the next round. Two whole batches were left to languish in the "too ugly to present to others but still delicious enough to be picked at by me" container. Needless to say, I will need about a gallon of milk to go with my pickings.
Next came the ganache that would coat the outside of the brownie bites and make them look beautiful and festive. Making this ganache requires chopping, by hand, 8 blocks of baking chocolate. That is a lot. Especially for a girl who has never really acquired a proper knife set. So I sat there, rocking my dull blade back and forth, shaving off bits of chocolate bit by bit. About halfway through I started getting really angry and Pioneer Woman. I imagined her, all smug and self-satisfied, sitting up in her beautiful, huge kitchen (probably full of sharp knives) with four kids to chop chocolate for her. Who did she think she was, hefting this kind of labor on the unsuspecting public? I don't have any children to pawn physical labor off on. I barely even have a counter! I could just see her, cackling in front of a glowing computer screen as she typed up the instructions for making this confounded dessert. She probably did it on purpose. She wants us to fail! That way no other cook in Oklahoma will ever be as good as her! Those pictures probably aren't even real! And so it went until the last block of chocolate had finally been shaved into pieces small enough to melt.
I slowly, carefully uncurled my cramped hand (now covered in chocolate) from the handle of my knife (now also covered in chocolate). But this is the part where this recipe really redeemed itself for me. Aside from the chocolate chopping, this was absurdly easy. I never want to melt chocolate any other way ever again. Heating up the cream, etc. in the microwave was the best thing ever, and it melted that chocolate like whoa. And it was beautiful. This ganache was beautiful. It was creamy, shiny, and it ribboned beautifully when I moved my spoon up and down (which I did, hypnotically, for a good minute and a half). So I dipped my 17 sad-looking little brownies in the ganache, and they started to look fancy and respectable. I sprinkled them with red and green sugar sprinkles and they began to look downright festive. I left them to set overnight and scraped them off the parchment paper this morning. They are now resting gently in all their gooey goodness in one of my treat tins.
I was left with about a gallon of ganache, meant to have been used on the brownie bites that never were. This was so good that I saved it in a tupperware container and plan to try to use it for something else--maybe homemade truffles or something. (Although, that would require melting more chocolate, and you never do know how that is going to go.)
Would I ever make this recipe again? To be frank, after the brownies messed up for the third time I crumpled it up in a ball and threw it in the trash. But I might fish it out just for the ganache recipe. That is something I could use over and over, on anything. Because you can coat anything in delicious chocolate. Has anyone ever tried chocolate covered cheese? Because that would pretty much just combine two of my very favorite things. But other than that, I will probably steer away from this recipe in the future. I don't know where I went wrong, but I don't want to go through the heartache and pain of following the directions to the letter and having everything go awry. In the light of morning though, I realize that Pioneer Woman probably isn't an evil mastermind plotting the destruction of all amateur cooks. She is probably just better at this kind of thing than I am. So now, instead of wanting to hit her with my muffin tin, I would like her to come to my house and show me how to do these things properly.
Today I am baking the sugar cookies and molasses cookies. If these turn out better than the brownies I may chronicle their creation as well, and make this a Holiday Baking Series.
Over and out.
Last night, in my kitchen, was the Brownie Apocalypse.
It started out innocently enough. I had been browsing around, finding fun new things to try this Christmas, and stumbled upon (saw in my Google reader feed) this little gem from The Pioneer Woman. I thought, "This will be the perfect little addition to our usual goodies." Foolish, foolish girl.
After purchasing the proper ingredients and bringing them home I began my work. Melting the chocolate went surprisingly well, which was a fortunate surprise, since usually I have the darndest time trying to get chocolate to melt properly. Nevertheless, this time it went (ahem) smoothly, and by the time I had finished I had a respectable looking brownie batter. I scooped it into a well-greased mini-muffin tin, and put it into the oven. I even remembered to set the actual timer like a responsible cook. (Most times I just eyeball it, which, to be fair, has only ended in disaster a couple times.) After spending 14 minutes reading a trashy romance novel (when I should have been starting the clean-up process), I took 24 perfect-looking miniature brownies out of the oven. They looked fabulous and smelled divine.
Until I tried to "flip the cooled pan over and let them finish on a cooling rack" per Pioneer Woman's instructions. I flipped the pan over, but nothing happened. So I shook it a little bit. One brave little brownie bite plopped out and landed smoothly on the cooling rack. So, after a few minutes of fruitlessly trying to twist my metal muffin tin to make the brownies vacate their cups, I resigned myself to having to use a knife to try to pry them out of the tin to which they were so obstinately clinging. The flaw in this cunning plan was that these are decadent, gooey, delightful brownies. Meaning the second a utensil is inserted in their near vicinity, they collapse like undercooked soufflé. Such was my luck in this very instance.
Out of a recipe that is meant to make something like 60 brownie bites, I managed to extract 17 respectable looking ones that I felt deserved to move on to the next round. Two whole batches were left to languish in the "too ugly to present to others but still delicious enough to be picked at by me" container. Needless to say, I will need about a gallon of milk to go with my pickings.
Next came the ganache that would coat the outside of the brownie bites and make them look beautiful and festive. Making this ganache requires chopping, by hand, 8 blocks of baking chocolate. That is a lot. Especially for a girl who has never really acquired a proper knife set. So I sat there, rocking my dull blade back and forth, shaving off bits of chocolate bit by bit. About halfway through I started getting really angry and Pioneer Woman. I imagined her, all smug and self-satisfied, sitting up in her beautiful, huge kitchen (probably full of sharp knives) with four kids to chop chocolate for her. Who did she think she was, hefting this kind of labor on the unsuspecting public? I don't have any children to pawn physical labor off on. I barely even have a counter! I could just see her, cackling in front of a glowing computer screen as she typed up the instructions for making this confounded dessert. She probably did it on purpose. She wants us to fail! That way no other cook in Oklahoma will ever be as good as her! Those pictures probably aren't even real! And so it went until the last block of chocolate had finally been shaved into pieces small enough to melt.
I slowly, carefully uncurled my cramped hand (now covered in chocolate) from the handle of my knife (now also covered in chocolate). But this is the part where this recipe really redeemed itself for me. Aside from the chocolate chopping, this was absurdly easy. I never want to melt chocolate any other way ever again. Heating up the cream, etc. in the microwave was the best thing ever, and it melted that chocolate like whoa. And it was beautiful. This ganache was beautiful. It was creamy, shiny, and it ribboned beautifully when I moved my spoon up and down (which I did, hypnotically, for a good minute and a half). So I dipped my 17 sad-looking little brownies in the ganache, and they started to look fancy and respectable. I sprinkled them with red and green sugar sprinkles and they began to look downright festive. I left them to set overnight and scraped them off the parchment paper this morning. They are now resting gently in all their gooey goodness in one of my treat tins.
I was left with about a gallon of ganache, meant to have been used on the brownie bites that never were. This was so good that I saved it in a tupperware container and plan to try to use it for something else--maybe homemade truffles or something. (Although, that would require melting more chocolate, and you never do know how that is going to go.)
Would I ever make this recipe again? To be frank, after the brownies messed up for the third time I crumpled it up in a ball and threw it in the trash. But I might fish it out just for the ganache recipe. That is something I could use over and over, on anything. Because you can coat anything in delicious chocolate. Has anyone ever tried chocolate covered cheese? Because that would pretty much just combine two of my very favorite things. But other than that, I will probably steer away from this recipe in the future. I don't know where I went wrong, but I don't want to go through the heartache and pain of following the directions to the letter and having everything go awry. In the light of morning though, I realize that Pioneer Woman probably isn't an evil mastermind plotting the destruction of all amateur cooks. She is probably just better at this kind of thing than I am. So now, instead of wanting to hit her with my muffin tin, I would like her to come to my house and show me how to do these things properly.
Today I am baking the sugar cookies and molasses cookies. If these turn out better than the brownies I may chronicle their creation as well, and make this a Holiday Baking Series.
Over and out.
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