« Great Moments in the History of White Trash: A White Trash Wedding | Main | Support reviews of bad comics or the terrorists have already won. »
November 17, 2005
Baking... but not really.
So I like to bake things. Sometimes these things involve relatively complicated mixes and measures, and sometimes you just dump it all in there and throw that shit into the oven. Sometimes you pick up a Pepperidge Farms frozen job and eat it all in one sitting while watching "When Harry Met Sally." Sometimes.
Anyone who bakes regularly (or maybe anyone whose baked anything ever) knows this, but the people who get to share the bounty of your kitchen aren't that much more impressed when you've made a cake from scratch than when you've made something that came in a box, pan included. That's why I don't mind making the occasional "I baked, but not really" treat. Ideally, you will have used a few actual ingredients (eggs, butter, cocoa), and added them to some pre-fab product (cake mix, powdered instant coffee, a bag of 50 unwrapped Kraft caramels) so you can feel like "Hey! I really made this!" Bonus points if the recipe in question is baked all in one pan and requires no more effort in the end than cutting it into bars or sprinkling it with a little confectioners' sugar.
So when Emily shared the following recipe from a book she was reading, I felt like I had to give it a try. A bit of web-research (and by that I mean one Google-search and clicking on one page-worth of results) yielded a couple of alternate recipes for these brownies, some of which were from scratch, but I like this one because it's base is cake-mix, and we all know how much I love cake mix.
Why the author of the book would ever suggest using skim evaporated milk or milk chocolate chips in this recipe is beyond me (semi-sweet are the only chips to use, in my book at least), but she was writing about dealing with breakups, so I suppose in that situation, any chocolate is good chocolate.
I tried the recipe to the letter the first time I made these last weekend, but they were lacking a certain something, so I altered it a bit, but it remains essentially the same: one of those much-too-sweet one-pan indulgences that Americans are so fond of. I often like my desserts with a little more subtlety (at restaurants, I usually choose the fruit tart over the Chocolate Kamikaze Death Spiral Fudge Torte), but who'd really serve this as a dessert? They're for making and taking to work, so you can say... "Hey everybody! I baked... but not really!"
CRACK BROWNIES *
These are a little goopy at room temperature, but that's OK by me. For less goop, refrigerate them for at least 30 minutes before serving.
50 light (colored) caramels (about one 14 oz bag of the Kraft variety)
1/3 cup + an additional 1/3 cup unsweetened evaporated milk
1 package dark chocolate (like Chocolate Fudge or something) cake mix
¾ cup melted butter, plus some solid butter for the pan
2 cups (one 12 oz. bag) of semi-sweet chocolate chips
flour for dusting the pan
Preheat oven to 350º Grease and flour the bottom and sides of a 9x13 in. baking dish (even if it's non-stick). Set aside.
In a heavy-bottomed saucepan, combine unwrapped caramels and first 1/3 cup evaporated milk. Melt over low heat, stirring constantly, until caramels are melted. Set aside.
In a large mixing bowl, stir together cake mix, melted butter, and additional 1/3 cup of evaporated milk until combined. Divide doughy results in half, and, with your hands, lightly press half the dough into the bottom of the pan. Bake for 8-9 minutes, or until cake starts to puff up a bit but isn't totally done.
Remove pan from oven and sprinkle chocolate chips evenly over the top of the cake, avoiding the edges. Pour melted caramel mixture evenly over the chips, again avoiding the pan edges. Crumble clumps of the remaining cake dough across the top of the caramel.
Return the pan to the oven to bake for an additional 20 minutes. Remove from oven and cool for 15 minutes and then cut into squares.
In the interest of full disclosure, here are the changes I made from the original recipe:
• She called for skim evaporated milk, and I used the full fat version. Unsweetened, of course.
• She called for German Chocolate cake mix, and I used a dark chocolate mix.
• She called for milk chocolate chips, and I used semi-sweet.
*contains no actual Crack. You won't miss it.
Posted by kyle at November 17, 2005 2:13 PM
Comments
Gotta love this blog! As for the brownies, I've found that you can substitute crack for the evaporated milk. I prefer the low-fat variety.
Posted by: Kevin at November 19, 2005 9:33 AM
Kevin may not be my realtor, but he's an OK guy anyway. I should say, though, that I DO still harbor a disdain for those who do not use capital letters.
Posted by: Kyle at November 21, 2005 9:58 AM
While I know that one's audience is generally equally impressed by homemade vs. semi-homemade I am still making cupcakes from scratch tonight. It really doesn't take much longer. That said, I am sure that I will be disappointed at the moderate amount of joy expressed over my Magnolia Bakery cupcakes.
Posted by: Nicole at November 21, 2005 3:03 PM
Nicole... I know yours is primarily a knitting blog, but I sure would love to see a post about those cupakes. Sure would.
Posted by: Kyle at November 21, 2005 3:38 PM