Did the gentlemen prefer blonde 1 or blonde 2?

This post is in honour of two of the loveliest girls I know. The first is Roisin, who lent me THREE gorgeous dresses yesterday AND gave me the most amazing cloche hat which is too big for her. She is seriously one of the most generous and thoughtful people I know and I will make every effort not to get her dresses covered in Scootie hair to show how much I appreciate it.

The second is one of my work friends and colleagues, J. J is also one of those people you just simply can't help but love - she's nice and clever and funny and when I found out within a few weeks of meeting her that she has a project to bake a cake every week and give it away, our friendship was sealed. She mentioned last weekend that her cake of the week had been blondies from the Hummingbird Bakery cookbook. I have that book but I haven't tried that recipe. However, I do have a copy of the America's Test Kitchen blondie version, and I said I'd give it to her so she could give it a try for comparison.


Of course this all got me thinking about blondies, and frankly what a weird sort of idea they are - I don't think I've ever met anyone who has eaten a brownie and thought that what it needed was the chocolate taking out. However, given my liking for a quantifiable challenge, I was taken with the idea of doing a side by side comparison of the two recipes.

Getting ready to start testing

Sources and methodology
Now I have to say straight up that I can't reproduce the ATK recipe here because they police people doing that. So this is a report on a scientifically not very robust experiment. What I can say is that the two recipes were pretty similar in terms of ingredient quantities (hard to say exactly because one was in weights and one in cups). The ATK recipe specified brown sugar but that was about the only difference. However, the methods were very different: the Hummingbird one involved melting butter and white chocolate before adding the other ingredients; the ATK was a more traditional creaming and adding sort of job. As you can see from the pictures I didn't do anything sensible like make one and then make the other; no, I tried to do both at the same time, and it's pretty remarkable that everything ended up in the right bowl.

Things are getting crowded already!

Method and get-out clauses
I should add here a few more provisos to my scientific rigour:
1. I didn't have as much butter as I'd thought so one batch's quota had to be topped up with marge. However, this was the batch that won on taste testing

2. One batch was baked in a silicone pan; the other in a baking parchment lined regular pan. The silicone pan batch was the winning one.

3. The mixtures had different baking times, but the faster one took a lot longer than it was supposed to. This meant that both batches had the oven door opened on them quite a few times. The fast-baking-but-didn't version was the winner.

4. The Hummingbird recipe called for nuts. I used chopped chocolate instead. According to the ATK recipe adding nuts would turn them into congo bars which are another thing I'd never heard of.

Out of the oven: ATK on the left, Hummingbird on the right.

Results
So, batches baked, The Scientist stepped up to carry out the 'warm from the oven' test. I know, he has to put up with a lot. The next day I took both batches to the pub (yes, our local doesn't mind if you bring cake - is this the best pub in England??), and got our friends to try one each. Most people said they were too full from dinner, but then ate both anyway. The result was absolutely unanimous: ATK had it, both warm from the oven and cold in the pub.

This is not to say that the Hummingbird recipe was disliked - very far from it. That was the one everyone tried first, and I think they all thought it was going to be the favourite. One person even said he was drooling as he ate it. I prefer not to think about that too much but it can only be a positive comment. Someone else said that the Hummingbird one was more brownie-like, but he preferred the other.

ATK at the bottom, Hummingbird at the top. In the latter the white chocolate is melted with the butter in the first step

Conclusions
I think they speak for themselves really, don't they? I'd be interested to know (but not interested enough to go and research) whether the order in which you taste test makes a difference to your final judgement. If I were being really rigorous I would do it again with the pans switched over, but I think we've already established that I don't mind a little slapdashery (in my baking experiments, not my work, in case any of my colleagues/potential future publishers are reading this). I will be passing on the ATK recipe to J forthwith so she can spread her baking love a little further. As to what I thought: well, I'm a brownie sort of girl, I think. But I promise not to eat any while I'm wearing Roisin's dresses.

'Just had to' brownies

I'm sure that I'm not alone in bookmarking copious numbers of recipes from other food blogs. Occasionally I even get round to making some of them :) But sometimes a recipe pops up in your reader and you just have to make it right there and then. This happened to me twice in one day last week - once with Wendy's Baked Honey and Mustard Butterbeans which I only didn't make that night because I already had dinner planned (but looking at the picture again just now I still really really want to eat that dish right now!). The other was Alice Medrich's cocoa brownies which popped up on The Wednesday Chef. I don't know quite what lured me in about these brownies quite so irrevocably. It's an interesting recipe, using cocoa powder and no chocolate, and very little flour, but I suspect that it was the chocolatey photos that seduced me. I did go and make a half batch that very evening, and took most of them to my sewing group the next night.


I've made a lot of brownie recipes in the past, and what generally wins me over or puts me off is whether the darn things cook through properly. I like some barely cooked fudginess as much as the next person (who likes barely cooked fudginess - it must be said that this seems to really divide people, as evidenced by the two brownie-eaters in this house). But completely uncooked goop: not so much. These brownies did cook all the way through and firmed up nicely to cut into little pieces. Taste-wise they were very cocoa-ey - actually a bit more than I like, but The Scientist and my sewing buddies liked them. I'm just not too cocoa-y a sort of girl. So while I may not eat them myself again, I will happily make them for other people :)


Now, butterbeans, you say....?

Alice Medrich's cocoa brownie recipe at The Wednesday Chef

Fixing a brownie problem

I noticed to my surprise the other day that I only have one entry on this blog tagged as 'brownies'. It's possible I made a couple in the early days before I started tagging my posts, but still - that must be at least ten months with no blog-worthy brownies. Surely this is impossible - some brownie-hating little blog fiend must have been swallowing up my posts. But the more I thought about it the more I realised that blogging has made me want to try out new things every time I bake, and the old tried and trusteds have fallen by the wayside. When those tried and trusteds are brownies this is surely a travesty of the highest order which must be rectified immediately.


Luckily, I had an excuse. When we were in Leeds visiting Munchkin Gramps and family a few weeks ago we went into a posh little bakery in the Corn Exchange. It was a Sunday and very quiet, and the young man in there - who also did all the baking - let us taste lots of things. While the others were making appreciative noises about the very non-veggie-friendly lime jelly covered cheesecake, I was looking around, and noticed some manger-shaped brownie cakes filled with some sort of luscious chocolate ganache. When I pointed them out to The Scientist (once the distraction of the cheesecake had been dispatched) he looked very interested and suggested that they could be a good offering for a gaming night.


This weekend was the one. I knew I wanted to make little cakes with proper finished edges rather than slices from a big cake, and so I chose a recipe I'd cut out from a magazine for a brownie cake. It differed from other brownies I'd made because you separate the eggs, whisk the whites and fold them into the mixture at the final stage. Does that make it a cake and not a brownie? Who knows. As a joky nod to the fact that The Scientist has gone gaming over Valentine's Day (not a problem AND he sent me flowers as a surprise before he went), I baked them in heart-shaped moulds, and they looked pretty cute. I must admit that I never got as far as the ganache. I was going to make chocolate buttercream which is The Scientist's favourite, but I was just too tired in the end after a busy week, and we decided there was enough chocolate involved. But if I were making them to woo my beloved at a homey Valentine's supper, I might go the extra hog (sugar-induced coma - always a romantic end to a night).

When I thought more about it I did remember a few more brownies which have graced our oven in the last year. There was Dogophile Vegan Nurse's vegan brownies for one. And the golden syrup-based ones which Noodle helped me make. And I tried some black-beany ones which I rediscovered in the freezer the other day and which are a little odd (I am forced to concede that beans don't improve *everything*). And there was another more recent batch which had Celebrations chocolates baked into it which I planned to post about but which didn't photograph too well. I was relieved to think that the dearth hasn't been quite as bad as I'd feared, but it's good to put a conclusive stamp on it by selecting 'brownie' as I tag this post.

Mini chocolate brownie cakes (from ?? - oh dear, I must start labelling where the recipes in my folder came from. I suspect the Sainsbury's Magazine)

Serves 10

175g unsalted butter plus extra for greasing
225g dark chocolate, broken into pieces
200g caster sugar
3 medium eggs, separated
65g plain flour
50g chopped pecan nuts [I left these out; one of The Scientist's gamer friends has a nut allergy]

Heat oven to 180C/Fan 160C/Gas 4. Butter a 20-25 cm cake tin and line with greaseproof paper. Or, do as I did and use a silicon muffin pan.

Place 175g of the chocolate, plus the butter and sugar in a saucepan and heat gently until melted, stirring occasionally. Leave to cool [I wouldn't skip this - the eggs might scramble and that wouldn't be pretty]

Whisk the egg yolks into the chocolate mixture, then add the flour, nuts and the remaining chocolate.

Whisk the egg whites until they form soft peaks, then gently, but thoroughly, fold into the chocolate mixture.

Pour into the prepared tin(s) and bake in the centre of the oven for about 35-40 minutes, until crusty on top. I set the timer for 20 minutes for my little muffins and then started checking on them at 5 minute intervals. They probably still took close on to half an hour but everything takes a long time in our oven. Leave to cool, then turn out. The recipe suggests dusting with icing sugar and serving warm with custard or cold with cream.

Grub-by quilt

We had a momentous meeting last night: with our best friends' new baby, The Grub! He was born two weeks ago but we went on holiday almost immediately afterwards, and yesterday was the first time we could get down to see them all. He does, of course, have a proper name, but his parents (whom I will call Vet Mum and Vet Dad) called him The Grub while he was gestating, and it seems to have stuck. He's a real cutie little bean and enjoys dancing with his dad already. The Scientist and Vet Dad have been best friends since they were about eight, and The Scientist was Vet Dad's best man, so it was a pretty big deal seeing them becoming parents. In fact, one of the first stories The Scientist told me on our first proper date was how Vet Dad had rung him one morning and woken him up to tell him that he'd proposed. And, in fact again, The Scientist had been with Vet Mum and Dad the evening before our first ever date, and told them all about this new girl he'd met. Awwww.



We went bearing gifts - pizza for dinner, a pretty photo frame for the Grubbery, a bottle of whiskey from the Bushmill's distillery to toast the new arrival, and of course, a patchwork quilt. I wanted to use an animal theme and found the most gorgeous pattern on an American website called From Me to You. They were really helpful and put the pattern in the post before they'd even charged me the money! I try not to have favourites among the quilts I make because I make each one with thoughts of the people they're going to be for - but this one was a bit special, not least because of who it was for. It was probably the most complicated one I've made for one thing, but I just loved the animals, too. The most time-consuming part was all the little 9-blocks in the top section's background, which are individually sewn. Fortunately for me, The Grub was a bit late, which meant that with some furious sewing on our holiday. I could have it done by the time we saw him.

Since we were taking dinner I thought I'd throw in some dessert, too, and whipped up some brownies. I tried a different recipe from usual, from Cookie Madness which caught my eye because it contained golden syrup which The Scientist loves. It also uses unsweetened chocolate which I'm not sure we really get here, but I happened to have a bit left from my trip to America last November. It's unfortunate that I won't be able to recreate them until I can persuade someone to bring me some more back as they were really good - a satisfying amount of goo in the middle squares but without veering on the undercooked, and they were also nice and firm. The instructions said to refrigerate them but they were still warm when we went to bed so I left them in a tin instead and they were fine.


Why is there a rabbit posing with the brownies? Well, he helped me make them, and that will be another story anon.