some_stars | (no subject)

Another baking triumph! I reverse-engineered a brownie recipe AND adjusted it, and it turned out AMAZING. Granted this was the absolute bare minimum amount of engineering and adjustment required to call it that, but still. --Basically I couldn't find a cocoa brownie recipe that didn't make me really suspicious (like, I understand why someone would feel the urge to invert the cocoa:flour ratio, but I am fairly certain that cocoa powder and wheat flour fail to share some semi-important chemical properties), and/or take way too much effort (if I wanted to jury-rig a double boiler/bain-marie thingy then I'd just go ahead and use baking chocolate), so I looked up the one I've used in the past, which is the recipe that comes on canisters of Ghirardelli sweetened cocoa. Which I didn't have, only unsweetened, but the unsweetened canister tells you to use a 1:1 cocoa to sugar ratio when making hot chocolate, so I made some calculations, divided a fraction or two, and then reduced the sugar a bit.

And they came out perfectly, fudgy in the middle while still recognizably bearing the cake nature, and definitely not that awful fake fudginess that comes from just being undercooked. (WHY DO PEOPLE DO THAT, do they think we can't tell the difference? WE CAN. It's so gross.) And chewy! And sweet but not too sweet! I have already devoured about 30% of the pan. (Slicing is for losers, I just use a spoon.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Oooh, that sounds great! I've never found a really good brownie recipe, so I'd love yours if you'd like to pass it along :)

This is the basic recipe from the side of the tin. To use unsweetened cocoa instead, I went by the suggested 1:1 cocoa-sugar ratio for making hot chocolate on the side of the unsweetened tin--so, 3/8 c. cocoa and 3/8 c. extra sugar. Except I actually used a little less than 1/4 c. extra sugar, for fear of too much sweetness or weird things happening with that sugar being granulated instead of whatever form it comes in in pre-sweetened cocoa. It definitely still came out sweet, like it's not one of those "sophisticated" desserts for people who always think dessert is too sweet, but it's not sickeningly over-sweetened. Also I wasn't super careful about measuring the cocoa so it was probably closer to 1/2 c.

I didn't use the chips or walnuts just because I didn't have any around. And I'm not sure exactly how long I baked it--around 20 minutes, ish? I just took it out when it was pulling away from the sides and the toothpick came out clean. It's definitely a cake product, solid and sliceable if that's your thing, but with a nice melt-in-the-mouth kind of fudginess, especially towards the middle.