My Kick-Ass Brownies

So right now I'm making brownies in celebration of my friend Jei arriving from the States this morning. I've been baking brownies from scratch ever since I got How To Cook Everything four years ago. At first I specialized in the Cream Cheese Chocolate Brownies, but now I've adapted the regular Chocolate Brownie recipe after some experimentation. Here's the variant I'm baking today:

250 grams butter
200 grams pure chocolate
2 cups of sugar
3 eggs
1 cup of flour
two pinches of salt
two capfuls of vanilla extract
a capful of pistachio extract
100 grams of white chocolate


Heat the oven to 190 degrees Celsius. Put the butter and pure chocolate in a saucepan and heat them over a very low fire, stirring to keep the chocolate from burning. When both are completely melted, put the mixture in a large bowl and stir in the sugar. Then stir in the three eggs until everything is blended. Add the flour, salt, and extracts and stir until the batter is mixed thoroughly (and should be a rich shade of practically-black dark brown). Roughly chop the white chocolate into chunks and add it to the batter. Put the batter in a baking pan (mine is about 9 inches by 13 inches) and bake for around 32 minutes. The duration of the baking is the only subtle part and may require some calibration before you nail the optimal time -- I've found that different ovens may run hotter or cooler than the temperature you set it at. The brownies are done if they don't wobble when you shake the pan, and you can stick a toothpick or a fork in them and pull it out clean. Let them cool for a while before cutting and devouring.

A lot of things can be tweaked to suit your taste, of course. I use brown sugar instead of white sugar if that's what I have around, and it seems to work fine. I used to always use almond extract instead of pistachio extract, but I think the latter imparts a subtler flavor; other extracts or liqueurs could be used as well. Instead of white chocolate you could add peanut butter chips or butterscotch chips or leave it out altogether (and in the last case, bake for a few minutes less). Bitter-sweet chocolate works fine ... I've also used a small bar of coffee or orange flavored chocolate in place of some of the dark chocolate to get a slightly different flavor. Experiment and report back to me!

Burning myself

I recently suffered my worst kitchen calamity since I cut the tip of my left index finger off last year (as you do, when you're cutting onions with a brand new knife blessed with a frighteningly sharp blade). I was frying salmon filets in a grill pan, and I'd perhaps put a bit too much olive oil in. When I flipped one of the filets, I splashed my arm with several drops of piping-hot oil. Yowza, that hurt. More than a week later, I have an itchy constellation of red marks and peeling skin on my arm. At least the salmon came out well -- crispy on the outside, moist on the inside.

And I just repeated a horrible thing I did to myself earlier this year. You see, right as I'm finishing a shower, I like to turn the water temperature as cold as it'll go, and stand under it for a few seconds until I shiver and freak out and have to turn it off. But twice now, I've inadvertantly turned the water all the way hot while I'm standing under it, and the water gets quite hot in our apartment. Even worse than scalding my near-naked scalp is the feeling that I'm far too stupid to avoid damaging myself. That really hurts.