Knee-bucklingly good chocolate brownies - Not!

EDIT: The recipe for the brownies has been added at the end of the post!

A few (OK, several!) months ago, the beautiful, vivacious SD had brought a treasure trove of chocolatey goodies to work - something she and her sis-in-law "had just whipped up over Sunday". There were chcolate cookies - very nice on their own - but it was the brownies which made me pause, as a chocolate-induced endorphin rush flooded me and made my knees buckle. I
kid you not. I begged for the recipe right away, as I licked every little crumb from my fingers.

Madame obliged (going so far as to ring her SIL and jot down the recipe while cradling the phone between ear and shoulder - you know!) and voila! the key to chocolate heaven was with me. In typical fashion, I promptly failed to act on it and the sheet of paper with the recipe on it remained as a bookmark in my diary for a loooooooooooooooooooong time.

Till yesterday.

In an uncharacteristic display of determination, industriousness and organisational skills, I got together all the ingredients and whipped up a pan of brownies. Or, more accurately, brownies to-be-which-weren't. :(

While the crumb was spot-on (oh so tender with a whisper of crunch) it was the inside which was my Waterloo. Sticky, gooey, squelchy, rich, oozy.....you get the picture dont you?




The taste was awesome (obviously - anything that's entirely made of chocolate, butter, eggs, sugar and nuts CANNOT taste bad)but the texture was disappointing, to say the least.

And NOW we come to the main points of this post (Yeah, yeah, there ARE some.... :) )

Point 1: Identify your mistakes so you don't repeat them.

Possible areas of error could have been:
1. Got the quantities wrong: I didn't bother using scales to measure out ingredients by weight - and Mum did say that she felt that there was too little "binder" in the ingredients I'd assembled - something to hold the brownie together

2. Got the bake time wrong: My oven has no timer nor a temperature control or indicator. I go by the eye and the old-fashioned test of inserting a skewer and see if it comes out clean. I think I pulled out the pan 5-10 minutes sooner than I should have, terrified that the crust would begin to burn and go bitter. What I should have done was cover the pan with foil and cook further, allowing the interior to firm up while the crust stayed that glorious tender brown.

Point 2: Salvage the mess you have created - or know when its un-salvageable and trash it

There was no way I was going to trash all that richness, especially when it tasted fine. (I have thriftiness ingrained in my middle-class soul). So, the way out of the chocolate morass was: Ta da! Serve the brownie with ice cream! No one demands the perfect soft-set texture of a brownie when its swamped by a scoop of vanilla ice cream - all you need is a chocolatey sweet rich base - in fact, the gooeier, the better!

As for those bits which refused to get cut in neat squares and dissolved in sticky crummage - well, I rolled up my sleeves, and rolled them up in Indian-style mini laddoos - chocolate balls! The downside was all that butter and oil from the almonds started separating and gave the surfaces of the laddoos a glossy sheen. Problem solved by simply rolling them (gently!) in some powdered sugar/cocoa, like truffles. And served as truffles, too! :P

As Julia Child says, part of being a good cook is to know how to salvage culinary disasters - AND grin and bear it, without self-chastisement or self-castigation when they turn out to be unsalvageable.

All I can say is - given my track record of grinning - I am in the reckoning for being Mere Julia's favourite student. :)

EDIT: Recipe for brownies, courtesy SD:

Ingredients:
225 gms dark cooking chocolate/chocolate compound
250 gms butter, softened (at room temperature)
2 tsps vanilla essence
250 gm castor sugar
3 eggs - beaten (my 2 cents here: dont whip air into them, just beat them lightly - we dont want airy puffy brownies)
150 gms ground almonds
100 gms - walnuts, chopped

Method:
Melt the chocolate and butter ina double boiler. Once melted, remove from heat and mix well.
Add sugar+vanilla, mix well
Ass eggs, fold them in and then fold in the ground almonds.
Add the walnut pieces and bake in a greased-and-floured baking tin/pan at 170 deg C for 25-30 mins, till a skewer inserted into the centre of the pan comes out clean
Pull the pan out of the oven and let it cool under a fan.
Cut into neat squares, you can dust the brownies with icing sugar to decorate them.

Yields 25-30 brownies (squares of 1.5 inchesx 1.5 inches)