Battle of the Brownies!

^Vegetable Brownie

In an effort to get my sister to eat more types of vegetables, I told her that she'd have to eat one slice of eggplant from the casserole I made today before she could eat her brownie. She initially agreed, and we made brownies. My mum thwarted my plan, though, by giving in to my sister's crying/whining and telling her that she could just eat cabbage instead. I didn't take any pictures of the casserole because it wasn't particularly pretty. However, I did get pretty riled by the fact that my sister just plain refuses to try new foods.

In order to show her that vegetables CAN actually be delicious, I made two types of brownies today (with her help. I think that introducing people to cooking from scratch is great education). The first one was the generic, perfect, cliche chocolate brownie. The second one was a whole wheat flour, zucchini and cabbage brownie. You're probably retching at the thought, right? On the contrary, though, the zucchini and cabbage brownie didn't taste like vegetables at all! You couldn't even SEE the shredded zucchini (you could see some of the shredded cabbage because I got lazy with the grater).

The generic brownie was perfectly moist, dense, and chewy. It's the ubiquitous brownie you can get from a box, from the freezer, from scratch, or from a bake sale. It's not cakey, and it was kind of sweet because my sister added more sugar (since she wanted really sweet brownies). It was pretty fudgy. This is the kind of thing I would make for other people who aren't accustomed to my weird cooking style.

The recipe for the GENERIC BROWNIES is adapted from here, and I made only half the batch since my sister is the one who's going to be eating this one.

INGREDIENTS for a 200 cm^2 pan of thin brownies.

50 g oil

100 g caster sugar

1 egg

vanilla

25 g cocoa powder

50 g all-purpose white flour

0.25 tsp baking powder

METHOD

1. Mix oil, sugar, egg and vanilla.

2. Add in cocoa powder, flour, and baking powder, folding in a figure 8. The batter looks like this.

3. Bake at 177 degrees C/ 350 degrees F for 18-20 minutes on the bottom rack of an un-preheated oven. If you use the top rack, bake for 23 minutes.

*******

The vegetable brownie was not too sweet since I cut the sugar in half, not as oily, and definitely more cakey. I was actually pretty disappointed that I ended up with a cake rather than a brownie... it was more crumbly, but still pretty succulent. The cake is really dense and there is a slight grainy whole wheat flour texture to it, which I enjoy. Although I think it may be confirmation bias, there was a clean, vegetabl-y aftertaste which kind of reminds me of cucumber. The interesting thing about this vegetable cake/brownie is that the batter was the consistency of cookie dough, or super thick porridge. It also didn't rise much in the dish (Guess what?! I found a glass 20 cm square baking dish! Whoooo!!! My mum kept all the glassware in the top cabinet, above the stove...and now I'm putting it to good use!).

The recipe for the VEGETABLE CAKE is adapted from here. Incidentally, these are vegan. I aspire to make these brownie-like in the near future. Modifications for brownies include using less flour and using more oil...

INGREDIENTS for a 400 cm^2 pan of thick cake

50 g oil

110 g caster sugar (more if you'd like)

200 g grated vegetables (particularly zucchini, but I used a combination of zucchini and about 75 g of cabbage. Oh, right. Zucchini = Courgette)

pinch of salt

50 g cocoa powder

140 g whole wheat flour

30 g all-purpose white flour (I should've cut this out)

2 tsp baking soda

METHOD

1. Mix oil, sugar, and vegetables.

2. Add cocoa powder, salt, baking soda, and flour(s). Mix thoroughly. The batter will be extremely thick and sticky, sort of like moist cookie batter or thick corn grits. Or thick rice pudding.

3. Scoop batter into baking dish and spread it evenly.

4. Bake at 177 degree C/350 degrees F for 23 minutes on the bottom rack of an un-preheated oven. The shredded zucchini will miraculously disappear.

5. Somehow, half of the cake will disappear within a few well-chosen minutes.

"Two-Ingredient" Brownie

Yay for college kids with "no food" and a microwave!!

This brownie recipe requires you to purchase two ingredients.

1. Chocolate. I used baking chocolate, which is bitter (no sugar), though you could just use a candy bar. It was about $0.125.

2. Flour/bran/potato flakes/crushed cereal/whatever.

Actually, let's say your co-worker gives you a candy bar. A Twix bar, for instance. In that case, you only need to purchase one ingredient, the flour/bran/whatever.

You probably have the other ingredients in your house, or you can probably pick them up at Wawa or at some restaurant.

1. One packet of mayonnaise.

2. A few packets of sugar. I used four, but I think I could've done well with three. Some people may want to put in 14. If you use a Twix bar, you could put in less sugar, of course.

Method

1. Melt chocolate in microwave in a ceramic bowl.

2. Add mayonnaise, sugar, and a few tablespoons of water.

3. Add in flour/bran/crushed cereal/etc. until you have something that looks like cake batter. If you want something super gooey (like the chocolate brownie in the picture above), make it the consistency of pancake batter.

4. Microwave for a minute. Add a few more seconds if you want.

5. The brownie firms up a little when it cools.

6. DELICIOUSLY GOOEY AND MOIST AND HOT AND CHOCOLATEY!!!

...so next time you have all those random mayonnaise/sugar/artificial sweetener packets, you know what to do!

The price of chocolate is now the price of that flavour of cake! Whoo!

Mayonnaise is basically eggs and oil, which give the cake the fatty taste and the rise (eggs). No baking soda/powder needed!

As a side note, I found a super-widely-followed-blog (that I won't name, because I'm not impressed by it anymore) that gave out recipes listing the exact cost of the ingredients and the price per small serving. Everyone, including me initially, is so damn intrigued by it because it shows that a serving of pound cake is some 0.46 cents, or whatever, and that a batch of cookies is $5.21 or whatever. Right, if I follow the recipes on this blog, I'll make delicious cheap food.

What I realised after reading some of the recipes, though, is that the recipes are normal. They're the kind you can find ANYWHERE ON THE INTERNET. ANY blog could stick out its ingredients with the prices. ANY person can buy and make food using cheap ingredients from Walmart. My mum does. She just doesn't blog about it. I don't get why this particular blog gets so much fanfare; if I make a batch of cookies using someone else's recipe, it's probably going to cost around $5.00 as well. Only, the blog won't tell me it's $5.00 (my grocery receipt will, though). I mean, this blog says, oh, make cookies using flour ($x), eggs ($x), sugar ($x), butter ($x), chocolate ($x). $x per serving.

My blog says, oh, make cookies using flour, eggs, sugar, butter, chocolate. Eat them.

So, after I thought of this, I realised that that blog wasn't a big deal after all. And I also got turned off with the shopping at Walmart part. Meh. Haters gonna hate. I'm gonna hate, haha.

Ummm Failed Brownies?

It's my friend's birthday today and I decided to make a Domo brownie cake for him. I copied this recipe from Allrecipes.com and it failed. 30 minutes into baking, the edges were kinda crusty and the centre was still gooey.

Not "ooo fudgy brownie!" gooey. I mean, uncooked gooey.

It's now 33 minutes into baking and I'm sitting here wondering what to do, because now it looks like a volcano erupted. The surface of the brownie looks like a natural disaster. To be politically incorrect, it looks like Katrina visited my oven.

*goes to check cake with a fork*

And the cake just sunk lower. I didn't think that was possible.

The worst part is that I actually have to be somewhere in 15 minutes so I can't keep poking at the cake.

Later...

I got back from visiting my high school guidance counselor at noon, and I checked the cake. I had left it in the oven (turned off) in the hopes that the remaining heat would somehow cook the cake...for an hour. Generally, I trust leaving slightly undercooked food in the oven while the oven cools down. Bad habit, I know. The edges were crispy and rock hard and the center was...dense.

This is terribly photo-phobic.

So I cut off the edges. They were very crispy and shiny.

Looks better already! (Who am I kidding?)

So I added a lot of melted chocolate over the top since I don't have chocolate icing, and I made a mouth for Domo. The Smarties candy are there because the chocolate and the pink (should be red) icing kept mixing. I know Domo has black eyes, but I figured I should use a light colour because you can't see black clearly on dark brown. I also didn't know what I'd use for the eyes; I guess some chocolate would've been a good idea but I had used up the chocolate making the cover-up for the brownie earthquake.

Initially, I was going to go over the red/pink icing with white icing, but the red/pink icing refused to harden/dry. I think it's because I used too much milk and what I ended up with turned out to be a glaze rather than icing. So, I had to somehow get 8 triangular teeth to show up on top of Domo's mouth. What to do?! More Smarties? Almonds? White chocolate (which I don't have)? I ended up using tortilla chips, and breaking tortilla chips into perfectly triangular shapes proved too difficult so I just searched the middle/bottom of the bag for preformed mini triangles. I know tortilla chips aren't white, but I guess this will have to do. In bad lighting, this actually looks like Domo!

Brownies!

I was going to make my sister a Victoria sandwich cake today. However, she wanted brownies, so I literally just finished making brownies with her from scratch. I'm not super happy with store-bought brownie mixes because of the PHO, so I altered this brownie recipe.

Unfortunately, the liquid in the brownie refused to disappear so I ended up cooking the brownie for 10 minutes longer than it should've been cooked [hoping that the liquid would evaporate] and I ended up pouring the liquid down the drain [it somehow leaked out of all of the brownie... it was like pouring water out of a can of fish or something]. I'm not sure whether the liquid was oil or water, but I'm guessing it's the water from the milk.

This is my recipe, and I believe that there should be NO MILK in it [I'll try it again another time and see what happens without milk].

1. 1 cup sugar

2. 2 cups whole wheat flour

3. 3/4 cup cocoa powder

4. 1/2 cup honey

5. 1 cup oil

6. 3/4 cup fat-free milk [which I believe caused all the liquid problems...]

7. vanilla

8. 1 tsp leftover salt

9. 1 tsp baking soda

Method:

1. Mix all non-liquid ingredients. Add in all liquid ingredients.

2. Bake at 350 F, bottom rack, for 20 minutes. This fit well in a 9.5 inch diameter circular pan.

3. A lot of bubbling and liquid is seen.

4. Bake for another 10 minutes and realise that none of the liquid has evaporated.

5. Take out pan and pour out liquid.

6. Let it chill....

I believe that steps 3-5 should be omitted if I don't use milk. I'll have to try that soon.

The brownies didn't turn out super sweet, which I really like but my sister kind of dislikes [she likes everything saturated with sugar or salt]. The inside is extremely moist and gooey, although the outside is kind of hard [sorta gluteny too, actually]. It is a beautiful colour and texture. I'm very happy with it, except for the weird part during the baking. My dad thought there was some coffee in it, which I suppose means that the cocoa flavour is quite pronounced.

My sister added a glaze of powdered sugar, vanilla and milk.

Caramel Nut Brownie Luna Bar

What does that look like? A brownie? Cake? Bar cookie? Squished chocolate mille-feuille? Nah... it's actually a Caramel Nut Brownie Luna Bar. From a package. Factory made. Yet, if you had cut it up nicely and garnished a 2cm x 2cm chunk of it with a dollop of cream, you'd get this thing called a "gourmet" pastry. In high society [and middle/lower class, too, I suppose], plating matters so much. Which is rather stupid, since most foods end up looking pretty much the same in your mouth, and elsewhere. I've never really had a thing for plating. Plating makes food look too dead and ornamental. Food looks so fragile and I feel like I'm guiltily eating a sacred dinosaur bone. Anyway.

What a sexist wrapper. As though women don't like Clif bars... sigh. I'm sure guys like this too.

Looks delicious, tastes delicious! There are way too many Calories for a 48g bar but whatever... It is better than eating a cookie.

School Partayyyzzzz!

I'm getting fat.

Okay, that's the cliche thing to say, for a girl, no less, but it's true. The methimazole is slowing down my metabolism, so in theory I should be eating less. However, since we are PARTAYYYING in school [and out of it], I'm still eating a lot of food. Plus, I can't run that fast anymore, so for the same amount of time devoted to running, I burn fewer Calories.

So, on the last two days of school, I had a party in Calculus, Art, English, French, and since we all skipped 6th and 7th period for the senior prank [recreating the Woodstock festival], where there was food, I basically had a party every period of the day. Though, in the whole year, we've never had a party in physics.

But first... at the Environmental Centre yesterday, I was helping out with dyeing bracelets with natural dyes. The Beats way back in the 60s used to do this - using beets - nothing beats this beet typo... turning beet red, yet, Enviro Centre? [ha. ha. ha. That was not one of my "beetter" puns. Wow this is getting really bad.]

So, Calc - bagel party with a whole wheat bagel with cream cheese and spinach and artichoke dip!

Art - brownies, cookies, and a rainbow cupcake! [Thanks, AT]

English - Bagel Party - whole wheat bagel with cream cheese and a Boston Cream doughnut from Dunkin' Donuts. There are lots of sprinkles. The pastel coloured ones are actually prettier than the rainbow coloured ones.

French - MG, who is from France, made these brownie-like confections that are a cross between a brownie and a crepe. Seriously, they were awesome! I also ate a bunch of chocolate Munchkins [the only flavour I like] and Sour Patch gummies.

Woodstock - chips. They had cream soda in beer bottle shaped glass bottles, and fake cigarettes. However, I did not partake in the pseudo-druggin' since I'm straight edge [hahahaha].