Food & Thoughts

It's June, it's summer, it's HOT! Can't have the oven on for too long, so brownies, layered with ice cream from the lovely,  Foodbeam ? Hear hear! Only I never got so far as to do the cookie sandwiches - I just ate my cookies alongside banana ice cream from ParadIS . It was lovely! METHOD: This is a cookie, but unlike most cookies I make, there's no creaming of butter and sugar. Instead, you go the standard brownie route: melt chocolate and butter together, beat eggs and sugar, mix the two and add flour mixture. The batter ends up somewhat stiffer than a regular brownie batter, but only by a whisker. INGREDIENTS: These cookies use brown sugar - that's new, only my standard recipe has a mix of brown sugar and regular sugar. There's a - in comparison - tiny bit of sugar (30 grams), but that is more than made up for by the amount of chocolate - 200 grams. I used Valrhona Guanaja 70%. chocolate:egg:sugar ratio: Standard (January): 110:2:300 Meyer...

  For the month of May, I'd decided to try a cakey brownie. I should probably let you know - and I guess I already have - that I much prefer my brownies fudgy, rather than cakey. But you know - science. Perhaps I was missing out, not ever trying out the cakey ones? If anyone should know about chocolate (and hence, brownies) it oughta be The Scharffen Berger people. So I grabbed the cookbook I have from them, and found the aptly named: cakey brownie. They have other kinds, too, but this what was I needed. Here we go: METHOD:  The method in this cake involved doing a meringue to start - whipping egg whites with sugar, luckily nothing with thermometers and sugar syrup! I let the trusty KA do the job, and it was no problemo. The recipe did call for the meringue to be whipped until the sugar dissolved, and while it was whicking away, I started thinking whether my sugar ever dissolves?? Not just using this method, but Im pretty sure there's always a little grit to it... I al...

Unsweetened chocolate. Oh, the woe is me. Unsweetened chocolate was the key ingredient in this months brownie , coming to you from Deb, over at Smitten Kitchen . Not easy to come by around these parts, let me tell you. Back when I started this project, I asked one of my friends going to New York if he would get me some, but even in the City of Dreams, he didn't find it. Well, he didn't find the Sharffen-Berger kind I wanted. Luckily, I had some at home, from a trip I did many, many moons ago - but it was long-past-it's-best-before-date. Not one to be deterred, I used it anyways - which may be an explanation for my less than impressive results. (yes, that was a spoiler right there...) METHOD You melt chocolate and butter, then whisk in sugar, then eggs. Similar to my standard recipe, but the batter became almost fudge-caramel like - long and dense, somehow. And you could tell there was a LOT of sugar in there, with it almost crystallizing. INGREDIENTS: chocolat...

The first month of spring, and time for something new. For me, and The Year of Brownies, that meant really getting out of the comfort zone, in the form of adding something not chocolate to my brownies. Enter the walnut. I've had bad experiences with nuts. There's nothing that can ruin a cake, bread or salad like a stale nut, and for a long time, I was the type of person that bought stockpiles of nuts, only to have them go rancid at the back of the drawer. And a bad nut will most certainly mess up the taste experience, so perhaps what I've not liked about nuts in my brownies was not so much the texture, but the (off) taste. Given time, I've learned to keep my nuts in rotation, and now buy them when I need them, so they're fresh and sweet. There seems to be a trend towards me posting at the very end of the month, but I promise, these were baked on March 31st (hence the back-dating of the post). Nothing like a deadline, eh? METHOD: Slightly different from m...

February is my birthday month, so of course, we had to have brownies for my birthday. Choosing this particular recipe for this month made a lot of sense - in it's original listing, it makes 40 brownies and uses 750 grams of chocolate! No way was I going to find myself with that much cake around ALONE. I scaled the numbers back to 8/15 (original recipe calls for 15 eggs, hence the weird conversion), and even so, we had PLENTY of cake - even some for the fridge for a couple of days later. For some reason, they state in the recipe that the cake will keep for 2-3 weeks in the fridge. Yeah, not around here. METHOD Procedure-wise, this recipe has you melt chocolate and butter and add that to whisked together eggs and sugar. This is slightly different from my standard method, were the sugar is dissolved with chocolate/butter, and the eggs then added afterwards. INGREDIENTS The chocolate:egg;sugar ratio in my standard recipe is 110:2:300. The Meyer recipe h...

Like I said, I already have a brownie recipe I find pretty perfect. It has no add-ons, save for extra chocolate, when I feel like it, it comes together in no time, and I almost always have all the ingredients at the ready. Come to think of it, this recipe may have been one of the first brownies I ever made. The book that it comes from is one that I bought back when I lived with my still-boyfriend in London, back in 2000. It's called The Little Red Barn Baking Book  and is written by Adriana Rabinovich, who - I just found out - has a gluten-free-centered blog called Gluten-free Cooking for Kids . Back in the days, her company (also named The Little Red Barn) sold brownies, cookies etc. to Starbucks, Fortnum & Mason's and Selfridges to name a few, and she decided to share her recipes in this here book. aIt was a little unassuming number, but the amount of recipes I wanted to make - banana bread! cinnamon buns! Devil's food cake! Snickerdoodles! -  as I paged through it...

I miss it here. And you know? There's only one way of changing that. Getting back to it. This morning, while putting together a brownie for coffee guests coming over later, it hit me: I need a project. No better time for starting one than when the year has just turned. I think I have a pretty good recipe for brownies. At least I have one I always make -  I've made others, but have somehow always returned to this one. But is it really the best? I like squidgy and gooey more than cakey brownies. I like plain, unadorned brownies - no nuts, berries, add-ons - just chocolate, please. But perhaps I'm in the wrong? Thing is, I don't know. I need to find out. So prepare for a 2016 with a Baker's Dozen of Brownies - one for each month. My list is as follows: January: My go-to - Little Red Barn Baking Book's Brownies February: Claus Meyer's Brownies (from Meyers Bageri) March: Nigella Lawson's Birthday Brownies (from How to be a Domestic Goddess) A...