Yeah, I got the crackly top that the recipe mentioned! This week's recipe for my Tuesday's with Dorie bake-along blog is French Chocolate Brownies, found on pages 92-3 of Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours cookbook.
I sorta sailed through my first two weeks at TWD, but now we come to chocolate...and liquor...and I was afraid that this might not be a stellar week for me since I don't like chocolate and my entire liquor experience on a yearly basis boils down to one bottle of Limoncello Mark purchases for me for New Year's, lasting right up until the next New Year's. Off I went in search of ingredients.
One of the clerks at the market helped me select the right kind of chocolate. I was standing in front of that huge display thinking, "OMW, what am I going to do now????" and she must have sensed I was way out of my league in the chocolate aisle, so she looked at the recipe and said, "Here, get this." Okay. Then off to the liquor store.
I have never even been to a liquor store, so I decided just to admit it straight up and asked the clerk something along the lines of, "Hello. I would like to buy some dark rum for a recipe, can you help me?" He said, "Well, what did you want?" Hmmm...wished I knew. So, I just said, "Well, I guess that I would like a good quality rum and not just something rum-like for baking because it doesn't matter if I am just using it for baking, because it might just matter, so do you have anything like that?" At this point, the man looked totally confused or entertained, it was hard to tell which, so I said, "How about if we just pick out something that is sort of your best seller?" His reply, "Best seller? Now that depends...." and at this point he was clearly grinning (it must have been a slow day is all I can think), so I said, "Okay, let me restate this (and for those of you who are really into being politically correct, you might want to skip this part) and ask what your best seller would be to a person who looked like they might hold down a full time job, had a bath within a week, and handed you dollars to pay for it instead of a pile of coins...." He burst out laughing and said, "How about this?" I was delighted because I had seen this same bottle in Ina's pantry on her TV show, so I said, "Yes! That's it." Whew.
The rest of the recipe preparation was very easy, and fairly quick. Mark and Matt loved them, Matt even ate them for breakfast this morning. (Alex is hypoglycemic and could not indulge yesterday, but he might have a nibble today.) I was a little worried because they looked very gooey in the middle, even though I took them out of the oven and did the knife test and it came away clean, but it turns out that they are moist, like a brownie should be in the middle, and just really dense from the chocolate. A big hit here. Definitely a keeper as I hear tell. So, while you might not trust a 15 year old's judgment on such things, my husband is a big brownie fan and declared these "most excellent."
(Please note: I am not a believer in large dessert portions, so this plate contains one small brownie, one small strawberry, and two tiny scoops of vanilla ice cream for which I used a melon baller and not an ice cream scoop...in case you were wondering.)
Next week's recipe is found in Dorie's book on page 374 and is titled "La Palette's Strawberry Tart" and while chocolate is not something I enjoy, strawberries definitely are high on the list!