The KBAL Brownie Initiative

Any recipe that has two sets of instructions makes me groan. This one was no exception, until I started making it. Other that the instruction to boil the sugar, water and shortening on the stove (which I totally ignored), the recipe was pretty simple. It has LOTS of chocolate, 12oz, which is always the first test of a brownie recipe for me.

My youngest daughter wanted to help, so I set her to unwrapping the chocolate squares, which is one of her favorite chores. I put in the butter (no shortening here), sugar and water in a bowl and put the whole thing in the microwave instead of boiling it on the stove. Of course, it was after this that I read the instructions and realized I wasn't supposed to put the chocolate in yet. Maybe next time.

While this was melting, and hopefully boiling without burning my chocolate, I chopped pecans, 4 cups worth. This is not my favorite job, as I have mentioned in the past. For what it's worth, the chopper now has two cracks in it. Emily was hovering, waiting for her chance to drop these in the batter. I explained to her that it was for the filling, but she couldn't seem to comprehend that there would be a brownie batter without nuts in it.

I asked Emily to get the eggs out of the fridge, which became an issue, so I had to do it. Turns out one of them had broken in the carton so there was a big mess. Luckily Emily was up for the challenge and put the extras in the egg holder on the door and dumped the broken one in the sink. The eggs went in one at a time, and since I did not want to get everything in the kitchen dirty, I did this one the old fashioned way, with a wooden spoon. Vanilla, flour, and baking soda finished off the batter which was set aside.

Egg whites were hand whisked in another bowl until they were foamy. Emily got to help with this too and declared that the frothy mess was gross and looked like spit, especially after the vanilla was added. Then she launched into a 3 minute 'what if' dialogue about putting actual spit into brownies and how would people know and what would that be like. Kids are gross.

The pecans were coated with flour and a bit of baking soda. Emily diligently mixed this together while I was greasing the pan. She told me it was ready and asked if she could dump it in. I said yes. I gave a little shriek when I turned around and found she had dumped the nuts into the BROWNIE batter instead of the filling spittle. So I had to spend a few minutes carefully digging out the pecans from the brownie and listening to Emily apologize while insisting that she was right about where the pecans should go.

Half of the brownie mix was put into the waiting pan, the pecan filling was spread on top and the remaining brownie was used to cover it. I kept wondering why the recipe said you would have to push the batter into the pan with greased hands, when it seemed pretty fluid to me and all i needed was the back of a spatula. Must be that I didn't boil my sugar. The top layer was a pain because trying to spread it only mixed it up with the pecans and mushed the pecan stuff further into the bottom layer.

The pan went in the oven for 35 minutes and was taken out ready to eat. Thank goodness there was no frosting involved. It cooled on the top of the fridge overnight.

These were yummy! They had almost everything I wanted in a brownie, except the need for multiple bowls. They taste like pecan pie wrapped in brownie. I could eat a bunch of these.