Last Sunday, two opposing teams were locked in an all-out battle for supremacy, forces of darkness and light engaged in an eternal struggle, but only one could be declared the ultimate winner. I speak not of the Superbowl, played last week in Texas between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers, but rather the battle in my kitchen between two sets of untraditional brownie recipes.
It all started a few weeks earlier, when my group of Glee friends decided we’d all watch the Superbowl together so we could catch the new Glee episode together. We decided to potluck and, naturally, I decided I would bake something. The person who brought me into this awesome group of friends, my friend Leah, has been successfully navigating the Jenny Craig weight-loss program and specifically asked me if I would bake something Jenny-friendly so that she would have the opportunity to try my baking experiment. I told her to send me on one of her recipes and I’d see if I could swing it. She forwarded on a few options, but I immediately latched onto a recipe for peanut butter chocolate bars. I’m having a very difficult time picking out two flavors that are more perfectly suited for one another and more heavenly when combined – peanut butter cups are my favorite candy, and I’ve never come across ice cream better than Stewart’s Chocolate Peanut Butter Cup ice cream (if you’ve never tried it, stop reading this blog, go get some and come back – my writing will still be here, and probably seem better with the ice cream in your stomach). It’s worth noting that peanut butter was first developed by the Aztecs, and that their civilization utilized cacao beans for currency. I’m not saying that it’s why aliens visited the Aztecs and helped them build pyramids, but I bet it was a contributing factor. Regardless, I had high hopes for our peanut butter chocolate bars.
But just in case they didn’t work out, I wanted to have a backup in place for the other folks who’d be at the party, especially in case the Jenny Craig recipe came out as tasting too “healthy.” There’s nothing to kill the buzz of an overindulgent Superbowl party like a dessert that tastes like your gym would approve of you eating it. However, I’d been really bummed out at how much butter I’d been going through in the last six weeks as I’d been baking. It seems like every recipe calls for two sticks of butter, and I’ve honestly never gone through so much butter so quickly in my life. I was thinking to myself, “Is there a way I can do regular-style brownies, but stay away from using so much butter?” Enter a fantastic article in the New York Times the week before the big game with a few brownie recipes that all used only olive oil for their fats. Ask and ye shall receive.
So, our two competing recipes were Jenny Craig’s peanut butter chocolate bars and The New York Times’ Olive Oil and Coconut Brownies.
Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars (PBCBs)
1 stick butter
1 cup Equal
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup 2% milk
1/2 cup creamy peanut butter
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 cup flour
3/4 cup quick oats, uncooked
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/4 tsp salt
3/4 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
A couple of things here on the PBCBs. First off – really, Jenny Craig, a whole stick of butter? Come on, these are supposed to be healthy! Can’t we substitute out some of the butter so I can use real sugar instead of Equal? Equal is quite possibly the grossest taste in the world to me – bitter and metallic. Luckily, the only Equal I could find at the grocery store was in packet form, so I went with Splenda, which is less offensive on the palate. Also, health nuts, I only ever stock skim milk, so that’s what went into this recipe.
Olive Oil and Coconut Brownies (OOCBs)
3/4 cup olive oil
1/3 cup cocoa powder
2 oz unsweetened chocolate
2 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 3/4 cup four
3/4 tsp salt
2 1/2 oz semi-sweet chocolate
2 cups shredded sweetened coconut
fleur de sel
On the OOCBs, two quick notes. First, separating eggs! Scary! Second, I skipped the fleur de sel. It’s fancy, expensive sea salt, and way too trendy and precious to put on some brownies to be consumed in a post-pizza, -wing, and -Dorito bingefest. Maybe if I were making this recipe to impress someone with my knowledge of the latest in chocolate trends I would include it, but this party was more “Dude, this guy can bake, awesome” and less “Dude, Mark Bittman stopped writing The Minimalist, bummer.” When baking, it’s vital to know your audience!
I started preparing the PBCBs first. The instructions were fairly straightforward: cream the butter, add the wet ingredients, add the dry ingredients a little at a time, stir in chocolate chips, bake at 350 for 20 mins. Simple stuff, and it all came together pretty seamlessly. I decided to mix all the dry ingredients together in a bowl so I could add them all together a little at a time, it just seemed the right way to do it and it worked fine. I left the batter in its bowl and set it aside while I made the other brownies.
The OOCBs started off with combining the cocoa powder with some boiling water, and adding the chopped-up unsweetened chocolate to the mixture to melt it. This was not as simple as it seemed. Despite being totally separated into smaller pieces, the chopped-up chocolate kept glomming back together in a big clump, which took a while to melt down. To this, I whisked in the olive oil, and then the eggs, yolks, vanilla and sugar. All went pretty smoothtly. I was super-nervous about separating the eggs just because it’s not something I do often and if you break the yolk while separating the eggs, you render the egg pretty much useless. My first yolk did break, but it was as I was plopping it into the bowl once it had been separated already from it’s white, so that was pretty great. Now I feel less rusty on the skill and look forward to using it again soon. Then the OOCBs recipe threw me another curveball: folding. I had to “fold in” the flour, salt and chopped-up semi-sweet chocolate. Ugh! It was like I was back in the pocket while my offensive line kept the the egg-separating linebacker at bay, but suddenly I look up and there’s 300 pounds of folding barreling down on me. Bet you weren’t expecting a well-executed baking-as-football simile were you. That’s just how we do on a boy bakes in brooklyn.
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| Successfully separated eggs. Booyah. |
In baking, folding has to be done gently as to not overly disturb the mixture you are trying to put together, scooping one ingredient from the bottom of the bowl and gently laying overtop the other one. I remember being a kid and sitting at the kitchen table at our friends the McGraw’s house and watching transfixed as the meringue of a lemon meringue pie was prepared. As I sat, completely entrance by the white mixture in the bowl, it was as though I was staring into a crystal ball and watching myself completely screw up this skill sometime in the future. The way it was done so delicately, I thought to myself, “This is just something I will never be able to do properly.” Well, I had to do it last Sunday, and it wasn’t so bad. I still feel like I overworked the mixture a bit, but the flour just kept appearing in big white bursts and never quite seemed incorporated into the chocolate mixture. Definitely something I need to keep practicing before I feel comfortable.
Now that the OOCBs were prepared, I greased up their pan, poured in half the mixture, added half the coconut, poured in the other half and topped it with the remainder of the coconut. This would have to bake a little longer at 350, so I threw it in first. I then greased up the pan for the PBCBs and poured in the batter. I quickly glanced back at the Jenny Craig recipe to see that this measly amount of batter would be used to make forty-eight brownies. That is just evil. Basically, you can have one of the PBCBs and stay on the diet plan, but only if you have a 1” x 1” square of dessert. Shame on you, Jenny Craig. I threw the PBCBs into the oven and prayed everything would go okay.
Oh, how wrong I was. The PBCBs were supposed to bake for 20 mins. At 15, the smell of burning filled up my tiny apartment. I rushed to the oven and saw that the whole bottom of the PBCBs was a very dark black. I quickly pulled the pan out of the oven, and to prevent any further cooking in the hot pan, dumped the entire tray out onto my cutting board in hopes of salvaging at least a few pieces for Leah to have for dessert. I’d promised her I’d make them so she could be included in dessert and now I was crushed. It was a nightmare.
I did my best to salvage the PBCBs but they were pretty hopeless. Luckily there were a few true squares that weren’t totally black on the bottom, maybe five or six, so Leah had a true dessert to have with the rest of us. I also was able to rescue most of the top half of the PBCBs, so we had some delicious PBCB crumbles to nosh on for the latter part of the game. And honestly, these tasted pretty great. There was just the slightest taste that they weren’t a real dessert, but I think overall if you tried them without knowing they were a diet recipe, you’d just think that the person who made them just wasn’t a great baker. I completely fault the Jenny Craig recipe folks for the fact that nearly the whole tray burned. There’s no way that the PBCBs should have been cooking at 350 for that long if at 3/4 of the way to the minimum cooking time, the PBCBs look like charcoal. Again, shame on you, Jenny Craig. You’ve done some wonderful things for a number of people, Leah included, but you totally screwed me over with this recipe. And you left me with a half-box of Splenda.
On to the debacle with the OOCBs, which were supposed to come out after 25-30 mins at 350. Now I’m gonna quote directly from the article, because they also did not know how long to cook their brownies for. “… Bake until just set and firm to the touch, about 25 to 30 minutes. (These brownies solidify as they cool, so inserting a toothpick to check for doneness will not work; it does not come out clean.)” Lies. All lies.
I checked these brownies at 25 minutes and they were firm to the touch, so I pulled them out and let them cool completely while I got ready to go. The last thing I was going to do before heading out the door was to cut up the brownies. The pan was completely cooled and I cut into brownies that were completely raw on the inside. By now, my oven had cooled off and kickoff was 20 minutes away. With a moan of severe frustration, I turned the oven back to 350, threw the brownies directly in without bothering to preheat and cooked them for another 20 minutes. What a nightmare. At this point, I couldn’t wait another 45 minutes to let them cool completely again, so I had to make sure they were completely done when I pulled them out of the oven. I spot-checked with a sharp knife and the blade came out clean.
These brownies were a pain in the neck, but totally delicious. They were decadent but not too rich, and the coconut wasn’t overwhelming. I’m not a big fan of shredded coconut, but this worked nicely for me. I felt that the second baking of the brownies made the texture a little tough, but what are you to do when the recipe fails you? Unfortunately, the claim made in the article was that the olive oil would make the brownies super-moist – not so much when they don’t behave according to plan. I’d be willing to try this recipe again, but not for a while. It was a lot of work.
So in the end, I missed seeing poor Christina Aguilera flubbing some lines in the National Anthem, but the party was a big success and I got to share my baking with some new friends. Leah loved her PBCBs, and the OOCBs were a big hit as well. At the end of the night, both the Packers and The New York Times emerged victorious, but only by a slim margin. And did you see Glee afterwards? I enjoyed it, but the Warblers scene was a little too fleur de sel for my tastes: trendy, precious and completely superfluous.
Thanks for reading!
- Jon
