Brownie-filled Cookie Experiment Part II: Brownie Recipes

To find out about the first part of this project, check out Part I!

After making a variety of cookie recipes for our brownie-filled cookie experiment, we switched over to brownie recipes to see if one would make a good candidate for stuffing inside some cookie dough and baking for an ultimate dessert treat.

The first recipe we tried was from a website that promised "Rich chocolate chewy brownies, not cakey at all!" The description is optimal for what we want to do, so we went in with high hopes. Also, the recipe is very simple and involves no refrigeration (which we found a bit annoying with the chocolate chip cookies). Once we were done mixing the dough, it was very dry.

Brownie dough, not brownie mix

The one finicky thing in the recipe is lining the 9 by 13 inch pan with greased parchment paper. To my untrained experience, that sounds redundant. Either you grease the pan or use parchment paper, right? My other cooking principle kicked in--Do not improvise on a recipe the first time you make it. Sometimes adaptations are necessary, like the fact that we only had one and half teaspoons of vanilla at home, not two. We thought it was close enough for this recipe, or at least we were too lazy to run to the store for half a teaspoon of vanilla.

We put the dough in the pan and thought it looked awfully close to already cooked.

Pan of raw brownie mix

Pan of baked brownies

We definitely did not skip the baking part, though if this one makes it to the brownie-filled cookie round, we will use the raw brownie dough with a cookie-dough wrapping.

The brownies came out very well. They were very thin and very chewy, almost like fudge.

The recipe for the second set of brownies came from this website. The recipe was nicely unfussy except for the whole "grease and flour the pan" routine which I am not used to. It did make brownie removal easy. Mixing up the dough was also easy. This dough was much wetter than the first recipe.

This photo brought to you by Black & Decker

In the oven to bake

The results looked great. By "great" I mean "cooked."

Those are not all toothpick holes

This recipe calls for homemade frosting. Those ingredients turned out the exact opposite of the batter--they were very dry, still powdery. We added drops of water until we had a more frosting-like consistency.

This photo brought to you by Pringles

We won't use the frosting on the final project (frosted-brownie-filled cookies?) but thought we should follow the recipe. After the addition, we were back to the raw look from the first brownie recipe.

Regression!

The brownies tasted great and were thin enough to be good candidates for the final project.

The third recipe was from a very finicky cookbook that we used for the chocolate chip cookies. The recipe is one of those with volume and weight measurements (imperial and metric) which I don't particularly mind. The recipe also includes premium ingredients and premium tools, like cake strips. We don't have cake strips and are not going to buy them for one recipe! So we did not exactly follow directions on this one, though we did by some premium ingredients (a couple of them were on sale!).

That's a lot of sugar

Mixing up the batter was not too difficult. This recipe also called for greased parchment paper to aid removal from the pan. We did a much less professional job cutting the paper so it stuck out more.

Raw brownies

The brownies cooked well, though at 300 degrees it took an hour to bake. We took them out a little early since we didn't have the cake strips.

Cooked brownies

These were thin and tasty, another strong candidate.

The final recipe was from The International Chocolate Cookbook and called for foil as the pan liner. Otherwise, the recipe was fairly simple and easy to execute. The batter came out nicely though it might have been too liquidy for the final project.

Raw dough #4

The final product was a little underdone and, while tasty, is not as good as the others above.

No brownie is all bad

We planned ahead this time and had samples of the earlier brownies for a "taste off" with the whole family. The final victor was #3 though #1 is the backup.

I hope you are looking forward to the next stage--integration!