Well, for over 3 weeks now, I've been feeling terrible, in that my body ached so bad. Then I felt an incessant pressure on my chest. I had felt uncomfortable and ceased all my activities and dragged myself to the doc's, convinced that I was having a serious illness .... but doc wrote it off as gastritis. What? Since when did I have gastritis? With some medication, in fact, I finally felt much better yesterday ..... and attempted to bake a brownie.
I used Poh's recipe - there's this show on Hypptv called Poh & Co; Poh who was a Malaysian is now a celeb cook in Australia, and in episode 6 of season 2 which I watched online, Poh made this brownie which looked easy - or so I thought. I followed the exact measurements and method, but substituted pecans with walnuts .... but the result was far different than Poh's .... Lol!
My brownies ... the tops were crumbled ..... and the insides were gooey; and overall, I found the confection sinfully sweet!
Anyway, to take it positively, there's going to be something I can learn from this failure. Firstly, I whisked the eggs and sugar with an electric mixer, and I think that caused the tops to be flaky and crumbly. The cloying sweetness was probably due to the quality of the chocolate that I used - not that of the 70% cocoa content that was in the dark chocolate; so if there was already sugar content in the dark chocolate, I could by right reduce the amount of sugar that went into my cake; if I were to repeat this recipe, I'd cut down the sugar. Then, the gooey texture was because it wasn't set in the fridge for 4 hours (according to my friend ...) .
My failed brownie was still edible though. It was difficult to handle, for it made a mess when I cut it. I served it in little paper cups. They were too sweet, so had to be cut small. I shared them out with friends and my students. Nothing went to waste, thankfully.
Common reactions : "Very nice, actually..." Yeah, I know. It was just sweet and didn't look pretty ...
Common reactions : "Very nice, actually..." Yeah, I know. It was just sweet and didn't look pretty ...
I had previously attempted a brownie too couple of years ago. And according to my friend, it was extremely sweet too. I did not try any of it as it was baked as a gift for a friend.
ReplyDeleteI think the trick is probably to use chocolate bar with high cocoa content, especially dark chocolate and good cocoa powder. I heard they say Dutch processed cocoa powder is the best, think it was Valrhona.
But I would normally halve the quantity for sugar most of the time. LOL!
Hello, yes I do agree with you that it's important to get a good quality chocolate with at least 70% cocoa content; heard of Valrhona, yes. But I've never seen it being sold at our local bakery ingredients shop. Common brands here are like Beryl and Tulip. Yeah, if I were to try out this recipe again, I'd increase the amount of nuts, reduce the sugar by half, and get a better bar of chocolate!
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