Much to my family’s appreciation, I’ve got a lot of brownie mix sitting in my pantry. However, if I know them they’re going to get pretty bored with the same brownies for dessert night week after week (well, I would too), so for tonight’s dessert night I’m using one of my favorite add-ins: cream cheese. Read More
This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie project was Espresso Cheesecake Brownies.
These fantastic little things cover all the (my) bases: chocolate, cream cheese, coffee, and sour cream. (I love sour cream in cheesecakes — it’s genius.)
Now, I totally messed up when I did these. I’ve been on Benadryl for a few days (allergies), and was distracted and didn’t read through the recipe first like I usually do. When I made the cheesecake part, I dumped in the flour, salt and baking powder mixture that was supposed to have gone into the chocolate/brownie mixture. Instead of scrapping it all and starting over (because I had no extra cream cheese or bittersweet chocolate), I went with it.
I kept the cheesecake mixture how I had botched it, with the extra flour, the salt and the baking powder. I then re-mixed the same ratio for the chocolate/brownie mixture like I should have done in the first place and added it to the chocolate. Before adding it all to the pan, though, I mixed in about 1/4 of the cheesecake mixture into the brownie mix. (I don’t know why — just trying to cover my butt, I guess.) Then I put the brownie batter in the pan, the cheesecake layer on top of that, and then the dots of brownie to do the swirling.
I then went all out and followed a suggestion from another participant the TWD site and added about an ounce of chocolate to my sour cream frosting when it was heating up. And you know what, these are the most decadent brownies I’ve ever made. I’m honestly surprised that such a mess-up not only worked in the oven, but ended up so tasty, too!
For those family members that don’t do coffee/espresso (though really, it’s so awesome with chocolate), I think you can safely leave that out. Speaking of which, I couldn’t find espresso powder at the store anyway, so I used one and-a-half times the amount of just instant coffee granules instead, and it turned out great. When I make these again (“mistake” and all!) I’m going to add some finely chopped walnuts to the brownie batter.
I’m participating in Tuesdays With Dorie, and this week’s project is Dorie’s Brownie Buttons from her book Baking. The recipe can be found at Two Scientists Experimenting in the Kitchen.
The brownies turned out well, but my biggest obstacle was that I didn’t have any of the bittersweet chocolate that the recipe calls for. I ended up using unsweetened chocolate instead, and tried to compensate by adding about two extra tablespoons of sugar to the mix. Though the brownies turned out a little dry, they tasted great, and the kids loved them!
The first step was combing chocolate, butter and brown sugar over a double-boiler to get everything melted and combined.
