BBF Brownies

As several past posts attest, I love baked goods and craft beer. The latest Bocoup Beer Fest inspired me to combine the two in a new way - namely, baking with beer. (I don't know what took me so long...)

I knew I had a winner when I saw an appealing recipe from The Kitchy Kitchen. Why did I choose it?

• It uses three distinct chocolates - cocoa powder, semisweet chips, and dark (70+% cacao) chocolate.
• It uses three distinct spices - cinnamon, cayenne pepper, and espresso (not technically a spice, but you know what I'm getting at).
• It uses beer - something dark and malty, which makes sense for baking with chocolate (though not for my personal drinking enjoyment).

What better, or more intriguing, way is there to get creative with brownies?! I'm sharing the slightly-reworded recipe here, with my notes in italics.

• 1 C flour
• 1/4 C unsweetened cocoa powder. The original recipe suggests Valrhona, but I already had Ghirardelli.
• 1/4 t cayenne pepper. I more than tripled this, but I could barely taste it in the finished product.
• 1/4 t cinnamon. I more than tripled this, too, and WOW - the pungent spice really came through in the end. I loved it!
• 8 T (1 stick) butter
• 1 T instant espresso. I used 3 packets of Starbucks' Via Italian Roast. It's not technically espresso, but it successfully imparts a strong coffee flavor to whatever I put it in.
• 3 1/2 oz dark chocolate. I used Valrhona's Guanaja feves.
• 1/2 C malty beer. I used Southern Tier's Choklat, an imperial stout brewed with...chocolate!
• 4 eggs, room temperature
• 1 C white sugar
• 1 C brown sugar
• 2 t vanilla
• 1 C semisweet chocolate chips. I used the Whole Foods house brand. Their chips bake better than Toll House's ever have!

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degres. Line a 13x9-inch baking pan with parchment paper, and spray it with a nonstick cooking spray.
2. Sift the flour, cocoa powder, pepper, and cinnamon together.
3. Melt the butter, dark chocolate, and espresso in a saucepan over heat. Stir the beer in once everything is melted, and let the mixture cool. The beer bubbled and frothed when it was added. It was here that I realized the carbonation was a key component of the recipe.
4. In a large bowl, beat the eggs, sugars, and vanilla together.
5. Add the dry and wet ingredients alternatively to the egg mixture, starting and ending with the dry ingredients. Do not overmix. The batter is very thin, almost watery - more like a cake batter than a brownie mix.
6. Fold in the chocolate chips. I enjoyed seeing the beer's bubbles poke up between the chocolate chips.
7. Pour the mixture into the prepared pan, and bake for 30-35 minutes. 32 minutes worked just fine.

(Two side notes: I omitted toasted walnuts for reasons my regular readers understand. Also, Claire said any malty beer would work, even a Belgian-style quadrupel! I'll use a quad next to see what Belgian yeast flavor, if any, makes it to the end.)

I am obsessed with these brownies for two reasons. First of all, the chemistry of baking with a carbonated beverage fascinates me. The beer provides carbon dioxide, so the recipe did not call for baking's typical White Powders. Secondly, the brownies look, feel, and taste unlike anything I've ever made or eaten.

The surface turned out pock-marked and irregular. (Thanks, beer bubbles!) Their texture was like a moist, dense cake with a soft, large crumb. The brownies' only fudgy aspect was at the bottom of the pan, where the chocolate chips had sunk and melted into a gooey layer. This almost-fudge was fantastic, and the melted feves plus cocoa powder added plenty of chocolatey depth to the cakier portion. Aside from the chocolate, the most aggressive flavors were the cinnamon and espresso. Both were so strong that I was reminded of Mexican chocolate. The cayenne pepper, even in its tripled quantity, was barely noticeable. The beer added some maltiness, but that, too, would have slipped past my taste buds if I hadn't been actively searching. Still, the variety in something as simple as a brownie has me wanting more, ASAP! My BBF compatriots must have agreed, since, yet again, the treats were gone in an hour.

What other items, if any, have you baked with beer?

Also, for those of you who may be wondering when I'm going to start a beer blog:

I already have one, in the form of Untappd! This app is basically a Facebook for beer. You check in beers as you drink them, with the option of adding your current location (powered by Foursquare), a rating for the beer (up to five stars, in increments of 0.5), a photo, and a Twitter-style 140-character-limit description. I'm pretty diligent about using it, so I have a record of nearly every beer I've had, plus tasting notes, since I downloaded the app last August.

Follow your friends and see what they're drinking. Like - or in Untappd parlance, toast - and comment on your friends' check-ins. Get ideas for future beerventures from the beers the app suggests following each check-in. Make a note of beers you'd love to have by adding them to your Wish List.

If you're as nerdy about craft beer as I am, find me on Untappd - and if you're curious about the check-in pictured above, you'll learn more in my next post! Don't worry, there will be plenty of desserts.

Things In Things: Oreo Peanut Butter Brownies

I'm seeing a trend when baking recipes surface on social networks. Everyone's combining multiple mass-produced treats into any number of uber-desserts - or so I've seen in friends' recipe suggestions, culled from Facebook and Pinterest. Think of them as homemade via premade. One colleague is particularly good at sharing these ideas with me, so that a small part of each workday is spent salivating over [insert CANDY NAME plus SOMETHING TASTY AND SPREADABLE plus BAKED GOOD TYPE here] rather than, say, project management. I baked the most tempting of Shannon's recommendations just the other week.

The treats in question were Oreo and peanut butter double-stuffed brownies. If there's usually a correlation between name length and difficulty of recipe, these are an exception to the rule. You will need:

• Cupcake liners. Spray their interiors with cooking spray before you start. Doing so will keep your treats from sticking at the end.
• 1 box of Oreos. You could be ambitious and use Double Stuffs, but they're probably too thick for the cupcake pan.
• Creamy peanut butter
• Brownie mix, prepared as directed on the box. I normally make brownies from scratch, but that effort's not worth it when the brownie is just one of many "things" in the "thing".

And now, the process!

Take an Oreo, and spread one side with peanut butter. Do the same with another Oreo. Stick one on top of the other, and place them in a cupcake liner. Repeat until your cupcake pan is full.

Prepare the brownie mix according to the package's instructions. Then, pour some over each Oreo.

Bake the treats for 15 minutes, remove them from the oven, and let them cool in the pan on a cooling rack FOR A WHILE. I tried removing them too soon; they remained gooey well after the cooling limit for cakes and muffins.

The finished product tastes exactly as you would expect. There are a lot of soft Oreo crumbles, and not enough Oreo filling. (This is when I wish the Double Stuffs would have fit!) There's gooey peanut butter oozing between the layers, which flows like fudge after being heated. Lastly, there's a thin coating of brownie around it all. I was very pleased with the fudgy and flavorful Ghirardelli mix, but there isn't enough of it per treat to really satisfy a brownie craving. That said, the dessert in its entirety satisfies any sweet, and a hint of savory, craving that you might have had due to its size.

These are so easy to make, and they go over so well, that I highly recommend making them if you ever need a quick, tasty crowd-pleaser. Thanks, Shan, for the idea!

Smitten with Brownies

I've sworn by my mom's Double Chocolate Brownie recipe for years. If we've ever been at a party together where guests bring food, you've probably had them. They have won renown, both in her circles and mine, for their bold chocolate flavor and dense, chewy texture. They're so good that I sometimes call them my Epic Brownies - if there has ever been a food that could anchor a great sweeping saga, it is these brownies. I never thought I would want to bake a different brownie recipe...

...until a few weeks ago.

I love the Smitten Kitchen food blog, and use it for specific recipes and general foodie inspiration. I ended up clicking through her "Bar Cookies or Blondies and Brownies" category one afternoon, which led me to this simply- yet effectively-titled post. It looked easy enough to make, and if Deb has a favorite, well, I'm more likely to consider her's than a lot of people's. I did my best to ignore any qualms I had about cheating on my mom's recipe, and baked them that evening. The recipe as published on SK makes an 8x8-inch pan's worth of brownies; I prepared that amount for the initial test round, but I've doubled it since to accommodate a 13x9-inch pan. Yes. I've baked this recipe three times and counting. It's that good - and my friends and colleagues would agree.

Here's the Favorite Brownies recipe with slight rewordings, and doubled ingredients to enable double the brownies. My commentary is in italics.

• 6 oz unsweetened chocolate, roughly chopped or broken. I used a combination of Ghirardelli chocolate and Baker's squares, since that's what was in my kitchen at the moment.
• 2 sticks unsalted butter, plus extra for pan
• 2 2/3 C granulated sugar
• 4 large eggs
• 2 t vanilla extract
• 1/2 t table salt
• 1 1/3 C all-purpose flour

1. Preheat the oven to 350°F. Line a 13x9-inch baking pan with parchment, extending it up two sides. Butter the parchment, or spray it with a nonstick cooking spray. The buttering is key - otherwise, the brownies will stick to the paper and you'll have a difficult time peeling them off.
2. In a medium heatproof bowl over gently simmering water, melt the chocolate and butter together. The elevated bowl is unnecessary. Melt your butter and chocolate in a pot on the stovetop, stirring frequently so that the chocolate doesn't burn. Not only will this save you dishes, but it gives you enough room to mix in all following ingredients. My double boiler is NOT large enough for all the batter!
3. Whisk in the sugar, then the eggs, and then the vanilla and salt. Stir in the flour.
4. Scrape the batter into the pan, and spread until it's even. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out batter-free. 27 minutes worked best for me.
5. Let the brownies cool before cutting into your desired size. These take a LONG time to cool, most likely because they're so dense. Give yourself plenty of time if you're baking them to bring somewhere!

Let's take a quick look at the gorgeous, deep, dark batter...

...followed by the shiny, textured surface of the fresh-out-of-the-oven treats! I love when the top layer of a brownie or bar cookie peels slightly away from the batter; this does that in abundance.

Lastly, behold the finished product! (Of course I put them in a Fortnum & Mason tin...but I wish I had chosen a better beer to join them.)

These brownies are easily the densest, fudgiest brownies I've ever had. If there weren't the cup or so of flour, they probably would be fudge. You should treat them like fudge, too - they get a little soft when eaten warm or at room temperature, so keep them chilled until you're ready to dive in. Also, a small piece goes a long way! I was initially concerned about all that unsweetened chocolate resulting in a bitter brownie, but the ample amount of sugar takes care of that. They're surprisingly sweet! The chocolate really shines in this setting, with the sugar to temper the bitterness and the butter to warm it up. (If I were ever to try making these with a lesser-percent-cacao chocolate, I'd have to cut back on the sugar.) In a word, phenomenal.

I'll still bake my mom's brownies. After all, the recipe's imprinted in my brain - I could go and make it in your kitchen, right now, if you wanted. And her brownies are beyond delicious! But if you're looking to be truly blown away by a baked good, or (dare I say it) smitten, I'd also want you to try Smitten Kitchen's.