The KBAL Brownie Initiative

I felt like I was in some weird kind of baking time trials when making these. I had exactly 10 minutes to make the second layer, which included washing the mixer bowl and beater. Talk about pressure! But it made the whole process pretty quick. And I had all the ingredients in the house.

The strange part of this recipe is that every time it called for butter (margarine, to be exact), it needed to be melted. In both layers and in the frosting. The bottom part mixes butter, brown sugar, oats and some baking powder, which is a crumbly mess. That gets pressed into the bottom of the greased pan and popped in the oven. And then the time starts... 10, 9, 8, 7,...

I had to quickly clean the bowl and beater and scramble around to melt butter, mix it with cocoa, add the eggs, flour and the rest to make the actual brownie part. This took me about 8.5 minutes, which included a small break to help my daughter with her vocabulary. Once the buzzer rang, I carefully took the hot pan out of the oven, and avoiding the sides of the pan, which were hot (this part was written in the directions, no lie), I carefully spread the brownie batter over the hot oat mixture and put the whole thing back in the oven. I'm glad the instructions warned me that the pan would be hot. Although I laughed at this, I almost did grab the pan without the pot holder when I went to put it back in the oven!

The whole thing took another 40 minutes to cook, which was a full 15 minutes longer than the directions. While it was cooking, I made the frosting, which also called for melted butter and came out a bit soft, but really yummy. All told, I was done in under an hour. The brownies cooled on top of the fridge overnight and were frosted in the morning.

This recipe was totally devoid of any kind of drama or surprises. I'm kind of missing the surprises of missing ingredients in my pantry and last minute dashes to my friendly Kroger. Oh well, I'm sure it won't be long until that happens again.

While not a true brownie in my book because of the oatmeal base, these are actually quite tasty. The bottom part gives a bit of chewiness (chewy in the sense of eating horse feed) and saltiness, while the brownie is chocolaty and the frosting is yummy and gets on your fingers. They are kind of hard to eat with a plastic fork due to the density of the bottom layer, but if these were cut into small squares, they would make lovely little items for a dessert tray at a party. Or for breakfast! Hey, there is oatmeal in them.

• Prep time: 25 minutes (I was on a timer, but 10 minutes of it was while the bottom half was baking)
• Cooking time: 60 minutes (15 minutes extra)
• Total time: 3.5 hours (includes cooling and frosting)

Modifications

None.

Improvements

Possibly make the bottom part a bit more cake-like so it is a bit softer.

My Rating - scale of 1-10

• PITA Rating: 2 (The only reason there is any PITA score on this one is the fact there were 2 layers and I had to help with vocabulary.)
• Difficulty Rating: 4
• Recipe Complexity (over a basic no-frills brownie): 6
• Texture: 6 (The bottom layer is a bit weird)
• Flavor: 6
• Overall Rating: 6