Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Flat Round Brownies

My phone charger got fried recently (these airport shop travel voltage converters are not very impressive), so I haven't been able to take or upload any pictures for a bit. I bought a proper European-plug charger today, though, and while I'm getting my phone back in action, here's a record of my recent attempt to make traditional American brownies to pass around during my colloquium talk at the Institute on Tuesday.

The recipe is more or less the one from Rosie's All-Butter Fresh-Cream Sugar-Packed Baking Book, with strategic modifications as noted:

Step 1.   Improvise a double boiler by putting a couple inches of water in a saucepan and setting a similarly-sized saucepan on top of it. Melt a 200-gram block of semisweet baking chocolate and about 200 grams of butter (or whatever's left in a 250-gram butter block after you take out a few tablespoons now and then for sauteing onions and potatoes for dinner or dropping a butter blob in the lentils) in the "double boiler" over simmering water.

Step 2.  While the chocolate-butter mixture melts and then cools somewhat, beat up eggs in the mixing bowl with a big German whisk that is inconveniently heavy and makes your arm tired. These German eco-eggs look a bit smaller than our usual Grade A Large (nice deep yolk color, though), so use four of them and beat well.

Step 3.  Find the one piece of graduated volume measuring equipment in the kitchen, a plastic jar marked with 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 levels that looks like about one cup. Open the bag of Kristallzucker which fortunately is more or less the same as regular granulated sugar, put a "cup"  in with the eggs and beat till very frothy and thick.

Step 4.  Pour the chocolate-butter mixture in a thin stream (so as not to curdle the eggs if the melted stuff's still hot) into the egg-sugar mixture, beating all the time.

Step 5.  Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C, which you can tell even doing the conversion in your head because there's no pencil and paper in the little kitchen is very nearly 350 degrees F, so good enough. In the meantime, open the little bottle of "Arome Vanille", WHICH IS CLEAR AND SYRUPY AND MILDLY VANILLA-ISH INSTEAD OF BEING NORMAL BROWN ALCOHOL-BASED STRONG VANILLA EXTRACT FOR PETE'S SAKE GERMAN PEOPLE WHAT THE HELL IS THIS. Pour some good glops of it into the batter anyway until you think you can smell and taste a difference. (Next time try getting a real vanilla bean and letting it sit in the batter.) Add a pinch of salt.

Step 6.   Open up the bag of Weizenmehl number 405, which more by good luck than good management turns out to be standard German low-gluten white flour which is pretty much exactly what you want for dessert baking. Carefully mix about a "cup" of it into the batter, and if you had an 8x8" brownie pan this or a bit more would make about the right consistency for baking brownies, but since all you have is a couple of baking sheets (oh, and you should have greased those with the butter paper back at the beginning), you need something that's more of a drop-cookie consistency. Somewhere between 2 and 3 "cups" will be about right. If you don't recognize a drop-cookie batter when you see one then try dropping a spoonful on a plate from time to time, and add flour until the dropped batter keeps a roughly circular shape and isn't runny enough to spread out very thin.

Step 7.   Drop teaspoonfuls of batter on the greased baking sheets and bake the sheets one at a time (although now that you think of it, even though there's only one baking rack in the oven, the sheets do slide right into slots in the oven sides so you could have baked two sheets at once) for about 15-20 minutes until crackly-surfaced, no longer shiny, and somewhat springy when poked. Remove from baking sheets and cool on paper towels on table because there are no cooling racks. The cooling cookies develop a weird eczema-like condition where a very fine grayish layer of the top surface flakes off (different composition in the chocolate?), but it tastes fine and won't show in the finished product. These definitely are more like flat round cakey brownies than like standard chocolate drop cookies, though.

Step 8.   While successive trays of cookies are baking and cooling, melt the other 200-gram block of semisweet chocolate in the "double boiler" and mix it up well with the remnants of the chocolate-butter mixture. Scoop up some of the melted chocolate in a big spoon and twirl a cooled cookie upside-down in the spoon to coat its top with chocolate. Set aside for final cooling and letting the melted chocolate topping harden. Repeat for all the cookies.

Optional step (not recommended).   While letting the melted chocolate topping sit in the "double boiler", fail to notice that the two saucepans have got wedged together and that the cooling water in the bottom pot is causing a vacuum seal to form between them, thus causing you to be unable to separate them for washing when the cookies are all done. Pulling, twisting, reheating on the stove and putting cold water in the top pan, shaking, squirting dish soap into the join for lubrication, and banging the pots on the metal sink are all equally unsuccessful. When the bottom pot has its handle wrenched off and both are severely dented but still inextricably conjoined, give up and hide them in your room and resolve to go buy a couple new saucepans to replace them. The Karstadt, Saturn, Woolworth, Depot, and similar housewares or department stores as well as the Kaiser's supermarket all carry individual frying pans but don't seem to have any individual saucepans. You will probably have to make the trek out to Ikea in Tempelhof.


Everybody did seem to like the cookies, though.





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