Super Fudgy Brownies

Super Fudgy Brownies - made August 19, 2017, adapted from The First Year Blog

This is one of those recipes where there’s truth in advertising. These brownies are super fudgy. Helped by the fact that they contain unsweetened chocolate more than cocoa and there’s relatively less flour compared to other recipes.

I’ve made countless brownies and tried dozens, if not hundreds, of recipes for various brownies. I have many brownie prejudices. I don’t like them cakey or “mousselike”, meaning too soft and mushy. But I do like them chewy, dense and fudgy with enough chocolate punch to make you weep. For that reason, I don’t usually care for brownie recipes that only use cocoa powder. True, cocoa will provide more chocolate flavor than from just melted baking chocolate. But the texture isn’t as good; it isn’t as dense and tends to have a more dry, cakey mouthfeel.

A good compromise to look for in a brownie recipe is one that uses unsweetened baking chocolate (and  sometimes bittersweet chocolate) that’s melted with the butter and a little cocoa powder sifted into the dry ingredients to amp up the chocolate flavor. The baking chocolate will give you the texture and the cocoa powder will deliver on the flavor.

As you can tell from the ingredients, this had a relatively large amount of baking chocolate in it compared to the cocoa and flour. That’s what helped live up to its name of “super fudgy”. With that much unsweetened chocolate, it’s also guaranteed to make a rich dark chocolate brownie, especially if you use the good cocoa, not the wimpy stuff. I kept this one plain to keep the focus on the fudgy texture but feel free to dress it up with add ins.

1 cup butter
6 ounces unsweetened chocolate
2 tablespoons cocoa powder, sift if lumpy
1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup chocolate chips

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line an 8 x 8" square baking pan with foil and lightly spray with nonstick cooking spray.
2. Melt butter and unsweetened chocolate together in the top half of a double boiler set over hot, not simmering, water. Whisk until melted and smooth. Let cool slightly.
3. In a separate bowl, whisk together cocoa powder, flour and salt; set aside.
4. Beat eggs and granulated sugar until frothy. Add vanilla extract and combine until smooth. Add melted butter-chocolate mixture and mix until combined.
5. Add dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Pour batter into prepared pan and sprinkle top with chocolate chips. Bake 45-55 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out with moist crumbs. Do not overbake. Cool completely before cutting and serving.

Brown Butter Cinnamon Crinkles

Brown Butter Cinnamon Crinkles - made dough August 19, 2017, adapted from Cookies and Cups

Is there anything better than browned butter? Probably but I can’t think of what that would be right now. Butter itself is the nectar of the gods. It powers all baked goods worth eating. Browned butter? A whole ‘nother level.

So I was predisposed to like this recipe for Brown Butter Cinnamon Crinkles from Cookies and Cups. It’s a fairly simple vanilla-butter-cinnamon cookie. The added little something-something was to roll the dough balls in powdered sugar before baking. Think of them as the vanilla version of chocolate crinkles. Because you roll them in powdered sugar before baking, they don’t quite have the velvety, melt-in-your-mouth texture that marks the typical Mexican Wedding Cake or the Buttery Tea Balls I like to make.

They tasted good though so I’m not quibbling. I advocate baking these just long enough to let the “crinkles” appear, meaning the cookies are no longer the smooth dough balls they started out as but have spread (slightly) and show the cracks in the powdered sugar coating. You also don’t want to roll the dough balls into the powdered sugar until right before you put these into the oven. Otherwise, the powdered sugar will just melt into the moistness of the dough.

When just the slightest bit underbaked, these have a great texture. If it had been a chocolate crinkle, I would’ve called it fudgelike. Since they were vanilla, maybe vanilla-fudge-like? Either way, they were delicious. If you want to amp up the cinnamon flavor, add a teaspoon of cinnamon to the powdered sugar before you roll the cookie dough balls in it. And I will again put in a plug for Penzey’s Vietnamese Cinnamon. Not affiliated with them but they have the best cinnamon ever. It’s the only one I ever use now.

10 tablespoons butter, melted and browned

2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup granulated sugar
1/4 cup dark brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup confectioners' sugar

1. Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon and salt; set aside.
2. Mix together granulated and brown sugars in the bowl of a standing electric mixer. Pour in cooled melted butter and mix to combine. Add eggs, one at a time, mixing briefly after each addition. Add vanilla extract and mix until smooth.
3. On low speed, add flour mixture, mixing until just combined. Cover and chill for at least 1 hour.
4. Portion into dough balls, cover and chill or freeze overnight or several hours.
5. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper.
6. Place confectioners' sugar in small shallow bowl. Roll dough balls in confectioners' sugar and evenly space on lined baking sheets. Bake 10-12 minutes or until cookies are set.

Hunka Hunka Triple Chocolate Cookies

Hunka Hunka Triple Chocolate Cookies - made dough August 19, 2017, adapted from Modern Honey

This is one of those recipes where I wonder if I did something wrong because I couldn’t replicate how the cookies looked on Modern Honey, the original blog where the recipe came from. I followed the mixing directions exactly and that’s where I wonder if I shouldn’t have. The directions say to start with cold butter and cream the butter and sugar for 4 minutes. I started with cold butter and I creamed the butter and sugar for 4 minutes.

But I rarely ever cream ingredients that long for cookies. Cakes, yes, to aerate the batter. But I don’t want airy cookies, especially not chocolate ones. But the main reason I don’t normally cream butter that long is it softens and warms it up too much, even though I started with right-out-of-the-fridge cold butter. That’s because I use a KitchenAid stand mixer and it easily creams butter in a minute or less. Four minutes might be fine if you’re using a hand mixer since they’re not as powerful as a stand mixer. For a stand mixer, beating butter for four minutes turned out to be too long.

I could tell the butter had warmed up because the dough was soft when I finished mixing it. I had to chill it briefly before I could form it into thick discs. That’s not a good sign. And sure enough, when I baked it, it spread like a normal cookie instead of staying almost as thick as the disc I had shaped it in. The texture itself was okay, not too light or cakey but definitely not as densely fudgy as the pictures on Modern Honey’s blog had led me to hope.

I will have to try these again but next time, I won’t beat the butter and sugar for so long. A minute should do the trick. You only want to beat just long enough to get rid of obvious butter lumps. The rest will smooth out as you beat in the rest of the ingredients.

1 cup cold butter

1 3/4 cups granulated sugar
2 eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder, measured then sifted
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
1 cup milk chocolate chips
1 cup white chocolate chips

1. Cream butter and sugar together for 4 minutes (I recommend 1-2 minutes). Add eggs, one at a time, mixing just until combined with each addition. Mix in vanilla.
2. Sift together flour, cocoa powder, baking powder and salt. Add to butter-sugar mixture in 3 additions, mixing until just combined. Do not overmix.
3. Fold in chocolate chips. If dough is soft, chill for 30 minutes to firm up before dividing into dough balls.
4. Portion dough into golf-ball size dough balls and flatten slightly into thick discs. Cover and chill or freeze for several hours or overnight.
5. Preheat oven to 360 degrees F. Line baking sheets with parchment paper. Arrange dough discs evenly and bake cookies for 10-14 minutes. Remove to wire cooling racks.

Cilantro Lime Shrimp

Cilantro Lime Shrimp - made August 14, 2017 from Rasa Malaysia

My favorite flavor combination for seafood is lime and cilantro. I first discovered it when my uncle, an avid fisherman, grilled a 10-lb trout he had caught and seasoned/stuffed it with this lime and cilantro combination that was to die for. Seriously.

Prior to this revelation, for savory foods, I liked a soy sauce, honey and lemon mixture to marinate and cook seafood in. But that got booted in favor of the lime-cilantro flavor profile.

I couldn’t find limes at the farmers’ market (they only had lemons) but I did score a bunch of cilantro there. I bought several limes the next day to make for this quick and easy shrimp stir fry. It was delicious. I know a lot of people don’t care for cilantro and without the lime, I’m agnostic about it. But add the lime? I’m there.

1 pound jumbo shrimp, peeled and deveined

1/4 teaspoon salt
big pinch of cayenne pepper
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 cloves garlic, minced
3 tablespoons chopped cilantro
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
2 tablespoons lime juice
fresh lime wedges

1. Season the shrimp with salt and cayenne pepper.
2. Heat a cast-iron skillet, add the olive oil and garlic; saute lightly before adding the shrimp. Stir and cook until the shrimp is half-cooked. Add the cilantro and butter; stir to combine well with the shrimp.
3. Add the lime juice and continue to cook the shrimp. Turn off the heat when the lime juice dries up and the shrimp is cooked. Serve immediately with fresh lime wedges.

Jumbo Chocolate Chip Cookies

Jumbo Chocolate Chip Cookies - made dough August 6, 2017 from Center Cut Cook

It’s ironic that the last chocolate chip cookie recipe I tried was a Levain Bakery copycat but it didn’t look or taste like Levain Bakery but this one, simply and honestly billed as a Jumbo Chocolate Chip Cookie and wasn’t trying to be a Levain Bakery copycat, came closer to being one.

Since it was supposed to be jumbo, I did make the taste test cookie as a jumbo. I portioned out a half-cup measure of cookie dough and made it into a high, round, thick disc. It was practically the size of a biscuit. When making large cookies, I prefer to make the dough into disc shapes rather than round balls. If you make them as golf balls rather than discs, during baking, the ends will spread thinner while the middle remains rounded. Which in most cases is fine but it does mean your edges are likely to bake faster than your middle and your edges will be thinner. Depending on how big you made the dough ball, you could end up with a raw middle and overbaked edges in the same cookie.

I prefer a little more uniformity so I go the disc route. The cookies spread less, remain thick at the edges and the cookie tends to bake more evenly, even if not perfectly uniformly. In this case, the taste test cookie was so thick (I wasn’t messing around) that it didn’t spread very much and the middle was still domed by the time I took it out. If I had left it in to bake longer, I’m sure it would’ve spread to a more even thickness but you know me and my preference for underbaked cookies.

Consequently, when I cut it in half, it almost looked like a Levain Bakery copycat in terms of its size and texture. Cool. The outside didn’t have the same crust as a Levain cookie but that was okay. This was still a great cookie. I could’ve baked it a trifle longer as the thickest part of the cookie was a bit more cookie-dough-like than I prefer (I’m not a fan of cookie dough) but still, at room temperature, this has great texture. You do want it to cool completely or else it’ll be too mushy.

I only made the jumbo size for the taste test cookie. I made the rest of the dough into normal size cookies since I was giving them away at work. As non-jumbo cookies, these spread to a nice uniform thickness. I didn’t try any of the regular-sized ones since I had eaten the jumbo (yes, all of it) but these disappeared at work faster than usual so I assume they came out okay, even at a more modest size.

2 1/4 cups flour

2 teaspoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon salt
3/4 cup butter
3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup granulated sugar
1 egg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cups chocolate chips

1. In a medium-size bowl, whisk together flour, cornstarch, baking soda and salt; set aside.
2. In the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with the paddle attachment, cream together butter, brown sugar and granulated sugar until well combined. Add egg and vanilla and mix until just combined.
3. Add dry ingredients and mix until just combined. Fold in chocolate chips.
4. Scoop dough into 1/2 cup portion and form into thick discs. Cover and chill or freeze for several hours or overnight.
5. When ready to bake, preheat oven to 350 degrees F and line baking sheets with parchment paper. Evenly space 3 frozen cookie discs onto each sheet and bake for 17-19 minutes, until edges are golden brown and middles are no longer raw. Remove from oven and let cookies cool on baking sheet for 5 minutes before removing to wire rack to cool completely. 

Bear Claw Hunt #4: Beckmann's Bakery and the Farmers' Market

Beckmann's Bakery - visited August 12, 2017

The 4^th recommendation from my Next Door post asking where I can find bear claws was for Beckmann’s Bakery. Someone mentioned they have a booth at the farmers’ market which was enough for me to go searching for the closest one where they might be. Fortunately, there was one only several miles from me and even more fortunately, that particular farmers’ market operated on Saturdays rather than Sundays. It’s more difficult for me to go on Sundays since I have church in the morning and by the time I can get to a farmers market in the afternoon, a lot of the good stuff is gone.

I’m a believer in supporting farmers’ markets whenever possible. They’re typically made up of small business owners, the produce is often far superior to what you can get at the large chain grocery stores and I’d rather my consumer dollars stay in my local community as much as possible. One of my friends once commented how expensive things are at her local farmers’ market and the prices put them out of her budget. Everyone’s circumstances are different and how we choose to spend our dollars is up to each individual; no judgment here. I feel fortunate that I’m only buying for me so I have the luxury of buying in small enough quantities that I can pay a little more for quality produce without breaking the bank. And, let’s be honest, I’m not enough of a veggie eater to really go crazy with all that fresh produce.

My local farmers’ market was close enough at just over 3 miles away that I set off on foot early on a Saturday morning to make the trek. I like getting to farmers’ markets right when they open so you can pick and choose from their best offerings. Walking there also guaranteed I wouldn’t go wild since I could only buy enough that would fit into my backpack and I could schlep it home, pack-mule style. The farmers’ market opened at 9 am and I arrived there a few minutes after it opened.

Most of the vendors were already set up and there weren’t too many people there yet. Other than the bear claw, I didn’t have a pre-set list of what I was going to buy. I had been hoping to buy Japanese sweet potatoes since they’re almost in season and I was still focused on using my new spiralizer but the vendors I talked to who were selling potatoes didn’t have any.

But in poking around at the various stalls, I did score ears of fresh corn (I boiled them later and they were amazing, so much better than the almost tasteless ones I last bought at the grocery store), raw peanuts for boiling (I love me some boiled peanuts), cilantro (needed for a recipe, stay tuned for future post), an onion and a bunch of green onions. Plus a few pounds of the sweetest green grapes I’ve eaten in months.

But my go-to purchase at any farmers’ market is always kettle corn. I know, I should be going there for the freshest produce ever but c’mon, it’s kettle corn. The life-changing product that made me permanently give up caramel corn as being too sweet and had me switching my movie-watching allegiance to the theater chains that served it (Century) instead of just regular popcorn (AMC). Yes, I decide where I’m going to watch a movie based on, not the movie showtimes, not the location, but which theater sells kettle corn.

It was still early and not many people (or none of them) were lined up at the stall for a 9 am kettle corn fix. The kettle corn guy was just getting started with popping the kernels and mixing that sweet-salty combination I love but they did have enough made for a small bag which his tween-aged son handed me when I came around. Younger children were playing nearby to amuse themselves while their dad and big brother worked the stand (love that family aspect of farmers’ markets). The bag was still warm from the kernels but I managed to resist diving in then and there. Don’t ask me how.

I was enjoying checking out all the different stalls that I almost forgot that I came for a bear claw. Almost but not quite. I found the Beckmann’s Bakery stall easily since it was well stocked with baked goods near one end of the market. The big banner proclaiming their name was also pretty pointed. There was a tempting array of bread loaves and other pastries laid out on the tables. I had to remind myself I only had a backpack that I had to truck more than 3 miles home strapped to my back and it was already full of ears of corn, peanuts, grapes, an onion, cilantro, green onions and kettle corn. Good thing I couldn’t find Japanese sweet potatoes after all or I might not have been able to fit everything in.

I perused all the baked goods on offer but the closest things I saw that might’ve been bear claws didn’t quite look like bear claws so I had to ask the guy if that’s what they were. He confirmed so I bought one. If you look at the picture, you might see why I was confused. It looks like a bear claw pressed back to back. Or as my coworker Eileen later called it when I showed her the pictures, it was “a hoof instead of a claw”. The top was so covered in sliced almonds and powdered sugar that I had to turn it over to confirm the cutouts that marked the “claws”.

BUT, I will give Beckmann’s major points that it really was a honest-to-goodness bear claw of my expectations. Meaning brioche dough, meaning almond paste filling, not brown sugar filling – eureka, I finally found a real bear claw. In terms of flavor, the pastry itself wasn’t as flaky as the one from Copenhagen Crown Bakery and I would’ve preferred glaze instead of the messiness of powdered sugar (there is no eating anything covered in powdered sugar with any semblance of neatness) but overall it was a good bear claw. I’m not a big fan of almond paste which is why bear claws are not my pastry of choice. But still, I was just happy to find a “real” bear claw. Kudos to Beckmann’s Bakery for sticking to the traditional rendition of a bear claw, albeit in hoof form than claw form. 4^th attempt was the charm.