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December 15, 2006
Week 7: Chocolate Heaven Brownies
Chocolate Heaven?!? How did it take so long for me to get this recipe??? John was holding out on me, although he did have a point about the chocolate syrup.
Read on to find out if these brownies live up to the expectations set by their name.
Analysis
This recipe was three weeks in the making. I actually made it for last week, but forgot to bring it in due to all of the other party things that were going on. I think I did better with this second batch.This recipe was fairly simple and hit the one bowl mark. The only weird part was the chocolate syrup. I never thought of using chocolate syrup for baking anything, although my girls have tried it (with really yucky results), so I was a bit leery.
The PITA part of this adventure was twofold. First, I had the butter and sugar creaming away in the Kitchenaid, when I opened the refrigerator to discover that all of the eggs were gone! Luckily, my husband came home just about then and I was able to send him to the store (since he was the one who used them all, it was only fair). Then came the part where I found out that even though I had 3 bottles of chocolate syrup in my refrigerator, there was not enough in them combined to make the required 16oz. After about 20 minutes of the turn-it-upside-down method, I had to make a trip to the corner store at 10:30 to get more chocolate syrup.
After I had the missing ingredients, everything went really smoothly, and I had brownies in the oven in 3 minutes. I used the air-bake pan on these, so the cooking time was increased by 20 minutes.
The frosting was easy, but weird. I put butter (not margarine, thank you), sugar and milk into a pan and boiled it on the stove. Then added chocolate and voila, fudge frosting!
These taste pretty good, although the frosting is a bit too much like fudge for me. The brownie itself has a crumbly, almost dry texture, but is moist and will wad into a ball at the same time. It reminds me of Devil Dogs without the cream filling. I might make these again, but I'm not sure if they deserve the 'Heaven' part of their name.
- Prep time: 85 minutes total (includes the 2 trips to the store and the emptying of the chocolate syrup bottles)
- Cooking time: 45 minutes (20 minutes longer than given); 8 minutes for the frosting
- Total time: 2.25 hours (includes cooling and frosting)
Modifications
I used butter instead of margerine (eeew! Who uses margarine?)
Improvements
I don't know what I would do to these with that heavy fudge frosting. Maybe give it a lighter, fluffier one.My Rating - scale of 1-10
- PITA Rating: 2 (for actual recipe, 8 for running out of ingredients)
- Difficulty Rating: 1
- Recipe Complexity (over a basic no-frills brownie): 2
- Texture: 6
- Flavor: 6 (Definitely chocolate, dunno about the heaven part)
- Overall Rating: 5
Posted by jamm at 08:53 AM | Comments (3)