The KBAL Brownie Initiative

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