"Basic Baking" Recipe 4

Blondies

Wow! The first thing I must say is that I never expected it to take me so long to finally make these blondies, but the day has finally arrived! Today I made the Blondies recipe from Basic Baking by Lora Brody. I made them to be the dessert to the meal I made for dinner tonight.

Ok, so first things first... Ingredients list! Here it is: all-purpose flour, salt, butter, light brown sugar, dark brown sugar, eggs and vanilla extract.

So... Blondies. Yeah, when I first saw a recipe in here for blondies, I totally thought "Yep, not gonna like these" but as it turns out, blondies are actually much better than I thought. I had never tried blondies before tonight, and I think I kind of thought they were something else. But now that I've actually had the joy of making and eating these blondies, I know that my ideas were way wrong before.

As for the creation of this wonderful dessert, it was one of the easiest recipes I've made from Basic Baking so far. First, I prepared a 9x9 baking dish by coating the bottom and sides with butter, putting aluminum foil on the bottom of the pan, and then coating that with butter. Then the pan was set aside.

I combined the butter and both brown sugars in a saucepan and stirred until the sugar dissolved and became smooth. I let it cool for about 10 minutes, then added the rest of the ingredients and mixed until well-blended. I poured the batter into the previously prepared baking dish, put it in the preheated oven, and baked it for about 30 minutes. After it was done, I put the baking dish on a wire rack to cool (and finished making dinner).

From start to finish, it took me about an hour and a half to complete this recipe (including 30 minutes of cooling time). We ate our dinner (Pork cutlet, garlic mashed potatoes, and a side salad) and then had the Blondies for dessert.

To illustrate how GOOD these blondies were... my husband and I are currently doing Weight Watchers (which REALLY works, by the way) and so after B had finished his dinner and eaten a blondie, he only had enough points left to eat one more thing without going over his daily limit. He debated whether he wanted a second piece of pork cutlet or another blondie, and was having quite a difficult time deciding, but in the end he couldn't decide at all and ended up going over his daily points allowance so he could have both!

So if I had to choose my favorite recipe from Basic Baking (from the 4 recipes I've already made) the Blondies recipe is DEFINITELY my favorite so far! It was SO good. I'm seriously tempted to eat a third(!) piece, but I will refrain myself.

Anyway, here's a picture of the final product:

Yum, yum, YUM! is all I have to say about this recipe!!!

Next up is Sticky Hands Caramel Bars. Check back later to read about the next recipe in Basic Baking.

"Basic Baking" Recipe 3

Birthday Cake Brownies

Wow, so it's been quite a while since the last time I posted on here. September was a busy, busy month for me, but I finally got to the next recipe yesterday! This recipe is called Birthday Cake Brownies and I'm assuming they get their name because they are brownies that have the texture and consistency of cake.

This recipe calls for: all-purpose flour, baking powder, salt, unsweetened chocolate, unsalted butter, granulated sugar, light corn syrup, eggs, vanilla extract, and milk.

The recipe itself was easy enough to follow. I prepared the baking pan, sifted the first three ingredients together and set it aside, melted the chocolate and set it aside, mixed the other ingredients together, then added the previously set aside ingredients. Easy, right?

Well, apparently not, because the brownies did not turn out right. Perhaps I did something wrong, didn't follow the directions as correctly as I thought, but the brownies came out crumbly and just didn't look right. The picture below shows the final product.

It may not be a good enough picture for you to see the crumbliness of the brownies (although, now that I'm thinking about it, this might actually be a picture of the bottoms of the brownies and not the tops, which looked the most crumbly).

Now, you may be thinking... "Brownies are supposed to be crumbly". Well, that's true but these particular brownies were not the right kind of crumbly. I don't know how else to explain it other than it just didn't look right. Oh, well. At least I attempted the recipe, right?

In any case, as far as length of time goes, everything I did up until putting it in the oven took around 45 minutes. Then there was an additional time of 25 minutes to bake.

I will say this: even though the brownies don't look right to me, they still tasted good. The flavor of the chocolate is all there; it's just the presentation that failed for this particular recipe.

As for my next post, I promise I will not wait another month, but due to the cost of buying ingredients and the fact that there are usually only two of us to eat the food, there will probably be a week or so between posts from now on. But I hope you continue reading.

I will leave you with this: The next recipe is titled "Blondies". Brownies... without the chocolate. What a concept!

Until next time... Happy reading!

"Basic Baking" Recipe 2

Fantasy Brownies

I made brownies this morning! They are SOOOO good! (and that's saying something, because I'm not really a "brownie" person. I prefer cakes and/or ice cream for dessert)

This is the first recipe in Basic Baking and now, having tried them, I know WHY they are called "Fantasy Brownies": because they are like a fantasy in your mouth when you eat them. Yum!

But let me start at the beginning...

This recipe calls for: unsweetend chocolate, unsalted butter, eggs, granulated sugar, light brown sugar, all-purpose flour, and salt.

It was a very easy recipe to follow. All I had to do was melt the chocolate (which, granted can get tricky if you don't do it right, but I was fine with it) and butter, beat the eggs in a separate bowl, add in the other ingredients (in steps), and mix it all together. VERY simple, which I suppose is why it's the first recipe in the book.

When I started, the first thing I did was gather all my ingredients (adding and mixing things together is MUCH easier when everything is already lined up on the counter, ready to go). Then I simply followed the directions in the recipe, added everything as I was told, and poured in all into an already-greased baking pan. From the time I gathered the ingredients to the time the pan went into the oven was about 20-30 minutes. Once the brownies came out of the oven, I let them cool for a while before tasting them.

Ok, now how to describe them? Well, the first thing I noticed was that they were very moist and... light. What I mean by "light" is that the brownie didn't give me a heavy, lump feeling in my stomach after I ate it. It was light and fluffy, almost cake-like (but different), AND they ended up with these nice swirls of white in them. The author of the book, Lora Brody, has said that over-mixing can cause recipes not to come out right, so I was worried about mixing them too much and ended up with not mixing them quite long enough, but the up side was the slight swirl effect on the top of the brownies.

So... Below is a picture of my wonderful "Fantasy Brownies". Not sure if you'll be able to see the swirls very well, but trust me, they were there.

Well, now that the first recipe is complete, my next baking attempt will be another type of brownie. These are called "Birthday Cake Brownies" and I might try to make those sometime next week. I want to finish off the ones that I have before I make another dessert.

"Basic Baking" Recipe 1

Blueberry Muffins

So here's the deal... When I decided to buy a book of baking recipes and post my experiences on a blog, my original plan was to start at the beginning of the book and work through each recipe in order. (For one, the book starts with easier recipes and then gets gradually more difficult, and for two, I would know for sure that I wouldn't accidentally miss a recipe. So that was my plan, right?

Well as sometimes happens, my plans changed last week when a friend invited me to go blueberry picking with her. Now I have all these wonderful, fresh blueberries in my fridge and I thought, why let them go to waste? So I looked through the baking book I had bought and found a recipe for blueberry muffins. I just knew fresh blueberries would make the end result even tastier.

So this morning, I got up sort of early (it's summer, you know, so I wanted to get my baking in before it got too hot out) and got to work making the muffins. The ingredients for these blueberry muffins are: all-purpose flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, blueberries, eggs, milk, unsalted butter, vanilla extract and lemon zest.

I omitted the lemon zest because I didn't have any lemons in the house, but the muffins were still good without it. (The recipe made 12 medium-sized muffins and my husband ate FOUR of them, so that should say something about how tasty they were.)

As far as the cooking process, it was a fairly easy recipe to follow. It took me maybe 30 minutes to gather all the ingredients, make up the batter (it was a 3-step process), and get them into the oven. From there, it took about 20 minutes for them to bake. The only real "mishap" I had while making them was that I accidentally dropped a couple of the blueberries on the floor, thought "I'm almost done, I'll clean them up after I get these muffins in the oven", and then (of course) stepped on one. Luckily, squished blueberries are easy to clean off of tile floors.

Below is a picture of the finished product:

The recipe made 12 muffins, but some of them looked prettier than others, so I chose a few of the good-looking ones to photograph.

Now that we have had our blueberry fix, I will resume my original plan in a few days and start from the beginning when I make some "Fantasy Brownies" from Lora Brody's Basic Baking.