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.