Red Velvet Brownies: or, A delicious excuse for food coloring!

Sometimes an innocent recipe wedges itself into my mind.

Red Velvet Brownies ½ cup butter 1 cup sugar 2 tbsp cocoa powder, or 2 tbsp powdered instant coffee* 2 tsp vanilla 1 tsp cinnamon 2 tsp red food coloring 2 eggs 1 cup flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease an 8" square pan, or a 9" round. Line the bottom with a piece of parchment paper cut to fit. Press the paper into place, squeezing out as many bubbles as possible. Then coat the top of the paper with more cooking spray.† Melt the butter. Stir in the cocoa powder (or instant coffee), vanilla, cinnamon, and food coloring. Mix well. Whisk in the eggs, one at a time, mixing each in well before adding the next. Then beat the whole mixture very well. Add the flour, gently stirring just until it is mixed. Pour into the pan and bake 28-30 minutes. A toothpick in the center should come out clean. When cooled, top with either cream cheese icing, or white icing flavored with a very generous splash of vanilla. Recipe can be doubled and baked in a 9"x13" pan. *You can turn instant coffee granules into a powder by pouring them into a bowl and pressing them with your thumb, or by putting them into a spice grinder. They may not be perfectly ground, but they will be good enough. Or, you can purchase powdered instant espresso. †This pan preparation may seem excessive, but these really wanted to stick to the pan when I made them. If you bake them on paper, they cannot possibly stick to the bottom of the pan since they don't touch it. You simply need to cut around the sides of the pan, and they will free-fall out of it no matter what. Source: Harris Teeter

My minor obsession with Harris Teeter dumbfounds my friends who live in their market territory. I recently visited a longtime acquaintance in Raleigh for the weekend. Even though no one needed to get groceries the entire time, I confused him with an excited shout of "You didn't tell me your neighborhood is right next to a Harris Teeter!"

He was like "I didn't think that mattered...?"

Anyway, when we remade the Harris Teeter lemon squares, I couldn't resist wandering towards their website. I soon ended up flipping through their other recipes, which led to today's adventure in excessive food coloring.

The idea of red velvet brownies intrigued me. But I didn't want an entire pan of them tempting me from inside the house. The brownies therefore had to wait until the next time I went out to visit people. (As we all know, the best calories are the ones we share.) As soon as some friends and I got together, I couldn't rush to the red food coloring fast enough.

After stirring everything together, our batter-in-progress looked astonishingly like that shampoo that adds a magenta tint to your hair. (The hair color is temporary, but it permanently stains your bathtub.)

I've never baked brownies that were so aggressively brick-colored before.

On a mathematical note, the original recipe tells us to use an 8" square pan. I don't have one of those. But a little bit of math told me that a 9" round pan (which a lot more of us have in the kitchen) has almost exactly the same area. Therefore, the batter would have the same thickness after pouring it into the pan. The only downside: no one gets a corner piece if you bake your brownies in a circle. Anyway, here is the mathematical proof:

I haven't used calculus since I spite-burned the textbook, but it turns out you use middle-school math a lot in daily life.

As we cleaned the countertops, I was reminded that there is absolutely no way to wipe up splatters of red food coloring without looking someone had a nosebleed. When the top of your trash can has a pile of paper towels that look like this, kitchen visitors get nervous.

While we were wiping red food coloring off of the countertop, the batter had baked into a beautiful-looking batch of brownies with a subtly sparkling top.

As much as I like cream cheese icing, I didn't use it today. I know cream cheese icing is a traditional part of red velvet cake, but saying something is delicious with cream cheese icing on top is like saying vegetables are delicious if you deep fry them. I wanted to know if the brownies can stand on their own merit.

So, I made plain white icing instead (though I was deliberately heavy-handed with the vanilla). Of course, this raises the question of whether the brownies were a highly-dyed substrate for vanilla icing instead of cream cheese. But I decided to let that conundrum join the eggshells in the trash.

The brownies tasted absolutely wonderful. The cinnamon is a downright inspired addition. I may put it into all my future red velvet cakes. Unfortunately, one of my friends said "I'm allergic to chocolate,"  and I can't bear to deprive people of dessert because of an allergy.  

Omitting the cocoa seemed like a trivial alteration. Red velvet cake only has a slight whisper of chocolate, anyway. The chocolate is only present to darken the cake. I argue that the food coloring, with its synthetically bitter undertones, is a more critical component of red velvet's distinctive flavor. 

With that in mind, I didn't need to come up with a counterfeit chocolate. I just needed another edible brown powder. Instant coffee seemed like a perfectly fine substitute. We had one minor difficulty in obtaining any: no one in the house drinks it. Because I absolutely hate when grocery money goes rancid on the back of the shelf, I refused to purchase an entire jar of the stuff. Fortunately, Mom generously donated these packets to the cause.

Of course, no one wants gritty granules of instant coffee in their brownies. Also, we wanted to evenly darken the batter, not bespeckle it. So, I needed to turn the coffee into a powder.

I first tried pressing the coffee granules into the side of a bowl with my thumb, but they were surprisingly hard. After more minutes than I expected (and a slightly sore thumb), the coffee still looked like this.

I next tried putting the coffee into the electric spice grinder. While we did manage to pulverize most of the coffee, a lot of the crystals remained stubbornly intact. So if you use instant coffee instead of cocoa powder, you may want to choose a different brand.

The coffee batter was a little runnier when we used cocoa. Maybe cocoa powder absorbs more water (or "moisture content" if you want to sound like an expert) than instant coffee. Also, if you look closely at the surface, you can see the infuriatingly intact coffee granules floating in the artificial red.

The finished brownies somehow had an even shinier top than when we made the recipe as originally written.

It turns out instant coffee tastes a lot stronger than cocoa. Fortunately, the coffee went perfectly with the cinnamon already in the recipe. (If cinnamon and coffee didn't go so well together, pumpkin spice lattes wouldn't exist.) I think I may actually prefer the coffee red velvet brownies to the cocoa ones. 

But whichever brown powder you choose, I definitely recommend making these. 

 

Third-Thrust Thursday: Pumpkin Spice Latte Chip Cookies with success!

 Ever had a recipe that you just could not let go of?

Pumpkin Spice-Coffee Cookies 2 tbsp ground coffee ¼ tsp salt 1½ tsp baking powder 5 oz pumpkin spice (or chocolate) chips ½ c butter or margarine 1 c sugar (set aside 1 tablespoon for coffee grinding) 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 1¼ c flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease a sheet pan. Put the coffee in a coffee grinder with one tablespoon of the sugar and reduce it to as fine a powder as the machine will make.* Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the coffee, baking powder, and salt, beating well. Add the egg and vanilla, beat until quite light. Stir in the flour just until mixed. Then stir in the chips. Drop by the rounded teaspoon (or, if you have one, by the rounded half-tablespoon). Bake 8-9 minutes for soft cookies. Bake until golden around the edges for crisp ones. Let cool before removing from pan. These are best made the day before. The coffee flavor strengthens overnight. Note: Even if you don't usually use foil for your cookie sheets, it will make it easy to just slide the pan out from under the cookies right out of the oven rather than waiting for them to cool before baking more cookies on it. *If you don't have a coffee grinder, you can use instant coffee instead. Put it in a very small bowl and press it into the sides with your thumb until it is a powder. Adapted from Hershey's

You may remember our previous attempt at making coffee cookies with pumpkin spice chips. While the flavor was right, the cookies could have been better. It seems that removing the cocoa powder threw off a very delicate balance of ingredients.  There was so much excessive butter that they got a little bit greasy. And they didn't just spread while they baked; they melted into one big puddle of cookie dough on the pan. I'm surprised that a back-of-the-packaging promotional recipe was so easy to mess up. I thought most companies tested them to ensure that you could make some pretty severe mistakes without getting an oven full of failure. It is part of making these recipes accessible and forgiving to the many people who are making their own cookies for the first time-- or so I thought.

 

Anyway, I was feeling like a failure of a culinary student because I could not make this recipe do what I want. I was about to just look up a recipe for soft chocolate chip cookies instead of changing this one, but someone else in the house was like "No. This is a challenge." Besides, this is my idea of a good time. I've realized that I like baking more than eating the results (this does not mean I don't like delicious pastries). Therefore, messing with a recipe can provide hours of entertainment. 

 

As we found last time, if you just pulverize the coffee to a fine powder it will not be gritty and ruinous. I've always thought that's why we use instant coffee in baked recipes. But after trying the daring experiment of using the same coffee that would go in the percolator to great success, we recommend that anyone who likes gratuitously adding coffee to recipes poke around in thrift shops for previously-wanted coffee grinders. In our previous attempt, Eric C. suggested in the comments that we also add sugar to the coffee grinder to perhaps pulverize the coffee a little bit more finely.

If you ever wanted coffee-flavored caster sugar, now you know how!

It worked really well. The coffee got reduced to an even finer powder than last time, and it didn't stick and clump to the grinder. You do have to periodically pick up the grinder and shake it to dislodge things that are a bit pressed into the sides while the blades whizz. But when you tip the grinder over, the coffee falls out so freely that this is all that remains before you even put a spoon in to dislodge what won't loosen away.

Today's recipe alterations are simple: decreasing the butter and increasing the flour. Unfortunately, I didn't know how much of one to take out and how much of the other to add. I took out two spoons of butter just because it reduced the amount to exactly one stick (and therefore eliminated having partial-sticks of butter in the refrigerator). When it came to the flour, I added as much flour as the cocoa powder we removed because it made arbitrary sense at the time..

We're also using chocolate chips instead of the pumpkin-spice ones because we only have one recipe batch's worth of them left. I wanted to make sure we had the recipe right before using them up because I didn't know when I would find them for sale again.

 

All right, we have successfully made cookie dough, but can we turn it into cookies?

I had no idea how long to bake these things, so I decided to go with the classic "bake until golden at the edges." I won't say it's impossible to go wrong with that as a guide, but it's very difficult to ruin something to complete un-edibility. The resulting cookies were very crunchy. But not the tooth-breaking kind of crunchy- these were good. It tastes like we accidentally reverse-engineered our way to the recipe on the back of the Toll House bag-- and then added coffee to go with the chocolate chips. The coffee flavor was a lot subtler than I expected- it was only just strong enough to notice.

However, while we were delighted with what we got, we did not get what we sought. We really wanted soft cookies like we got when we actually made the original and unaltered recipe. Make no mistake, these cookies were so good we ate half of them trying to figure out how to get what we wanted. Then someone finished eating his seventh cookie in three minutes and said "Why don't you just bake them less?"

It seems so obvious now that it's been pointed out, doesn't it? Figuring that the worst that could happen was having unbaked hot cookie dough to eat, we put a small test batch on a sheet and baked it for half the time.

It felt silly putting those few lonely dough plops in the big oven by themselves. Now that it's getting warmer out again, I am no longer as blithe about firing up this thing and heating up the kitchen with an extravagance of electricity. On the other hand, this experiment ended exactly where we all hoped!

In great happiness, we baked the remaining cookie dough and finally got what we wanted! You can see how we got all of the cookies nicely spaced out on the pan and then decided that we weren't going to do an entirely separate batch with the teeny bit of extra dough in the mixing bowl, and then just sort of made it all fit whether it should have or not.

Our only disappointment was that you could barely taste the coffee in these- and why add it if you can barely tell it's there? But just like the gingerbread we made one Christmas, they just needed to ripen overnight for the flavor to make itself manifest. The coffee that was almost invisible when we baked them had strengthened marvelously by the next day.

And so, our long recipe road leads to a happy ending! Having perfected the recipe, we could make these with the pumpkin spice chips that inspired this recipe. Furthermore, now that we knew that this recipe needs a night for the coffee flavor to ripen, we could be mindful of that and... well... at least try not to eat them all right out of the oven.

If you like your coffee to be practically a dessert with whipped cream on top, you will love these. They are fantastic. The only tragedy is that we ran out of pumpkin spice chips after this batch and therefore must hope that they reappear this autumn. It's always time for pumpkin spice if you truly believe, but pumpkin spice chips are unfortunately more rigidly seasonal.

With that said, these would be really good with white chips, chocolate chips, and chips of any flavor you think would go well with coffee (they had cinnamon chips the last time I was in the baking aisle, but it was not meant to be this week).

Second-Stab Saturday: Pumpkin-Spice Coffee Cookies

We earlier made chocolate cookies with pumpkin-spice chips. In case you don't remember, the chocolate and the pumpkin spice did not go together as well as I had expected. We speculated that, in the delicious tradition of pumpkin spice lattes, we should perhaps make the cookies again with coffee instead of chocolate.

Pumpkin Spice-Coffee Cookies 2 tbsp ground coffee ¼ tsp salt 1½ tsp baking powder 5 oz pumpkin spice chips ½ c + 2 tbsp butter or margarine 1 c sugar 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla 1 c flour Heat oven to 350°. Grease a sheet pan. Put the coffee in a coffee grinder and reduce it to as fine a powder as the machine will make.* Cream together the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add the coffee, baking powder, and salt, beating well. Add the egg and vanilla, beat until quite light. Stir in the flour just until mixed. Then stir in the chips. Drop by the rounded teaspoon (or, if you have one, by the rounded half-tablespoon). Bake 8-9 minutes. Let cool before removing from pan. Note: Even if you don't usually use foil for your cookie sheets, it will make it easy to just slide the pan out from under the cookies right out of the oven rather than waiting for them to cool before baking more cookies on it. *If you don't have a coffee grinder, you can use instant coffee instead. Put it in a very small bowl and press the granules into the sides with your thumb until it is a powder. Source: adapted from Hershey's

Today's recipe starts with technical difficulties. The butter had for some reason glued itself to the refrigerator shelf. I've often seen cardboard residue in people's refrigerators, but it always looked like it had been there a long time. This is the first time I have ever left such deposits for myself.

 

We weren't sure if we wanted to make coffee cookies or non-coffee ones. Therefore, we all agreed that we could divide the dough in half and do both. We decided to go ahead and mix the harder-to-halve ingredients before performing the bifurcation. Everything measured by the tiny spoonful gets put in now. 

And now, for a brief moment of kitchen science! The original recipe tells us to use baking soda. But it also has chocolate in it which is (barely) acidic. We have removed the chocolate from the cookies, so now the baking soda has no acid to fizz with. Therefore, we are using baking powder instead because it already has enough powdered acid to fizz with itself.

 

And now we get to the hardest ingredient to cut in half: the egg. If you really want to, you could crack the egg into a measuring cup, beat it uniform, and then measure out exactly half. But that means you are wasting half an egg. And while one can just pour the unused half-egg into a hot frying pan for a quick snack, we'd rather have twice the cookies.

At this point, we thought of Her Disapproving Highness, Fanny Cradock. She would have told us to think of someone we really don't like (but we're too well-bred to say anything) then take it out on the bowl. We could use a handmixer if we wanted. But while in isolation, this is my well-whipped idea of a good time.

And so, with the first ingredients excessively well-beaten together, we reached The Great Bifurcation! I should have actually measured out the halves, or maybe put the bowl on a kitchen scale and ensured that we had a perfectly even divide. Instead I just eyeballed it. I will also note that this sort of multi-bowl experimentation is only possible because we now share a kitchen with a dishwasher.

 

And now we get to our first star ingredient: the coffee! Most of the coffee-flavored recipes will have you use instant coffee (or to make a cup of it and pour it in). Using actual coffee, we are warned, will fill your creation with gritty coffee grounds and ruin it. But the instant coffee in this house is rancid and only kept for emergency caffeination purposes. I'd thought I'd stir in some of the normal coffee, but when I scooped it out it looked like a spoonful of woodchips.

Fortunately, this house has a coffee grinder. It last saw use when I was grinding granulated sugar into caster sugar for the most recent Pieathlon. As far as I know, this is the first time anyone's actually put coffee in it.

Coffee gets unexpectedly sticky when you grind it. I had to keep breaking up clumps that stuck to the sides and avoided the blades. But eventually, we had reduced the coffee from mulch to brown powder. I don't know if it's ground finely enough to prevent grittiness, but the grinder had done the best it could. At this point, it wasn't grinding anymore, just kicking the powder up and throwing it around.

 

I was a bit worried at the sight of this mound of coffee powder that looked almost as big as the cookie dough we were stirring it into. Had we overdone it? Would these cookies be horribly bitter? I could have just carefully spooned some out before stirring, but then I risked having unacceptably insufficient coffee flavor.

 

Before I could spend half the night considering acceptable quantities of coffee for cookies, I went ahead and stirred everything together. It turns out that one scoop of coffee is perfect for this amount of cookie dough. It tasted like one of those magical iced creations from a coffee shop that comes out of a blender and has a blob of whipped cream and a shake of cinnamon on top.

 

The last time I did this kind of assembly-line cooking, it was Thanksgiving and I was making three pies, two cakes, and multiple cookie recipes (it was my idea of a good time). Anyway, it is now time to put flour into these delicious cookies.

 

And now, we get to the other title ingredient: pumpkin spice chips! You may notice that I made a fatal error with the coffee-free bowl. I forgot to actually mix in the flour before adding the chips. This caused me a brief panic because I've always been warned that dreadful failure will always ensue if you don't actually mix your flour in before adding the chips. But I figured that we already had committed the ingredients. We couldn't put the butter or the egg back in the refrigerator, nor could we separate out the sugar and return it to the bag. So we just stirred everything together and hoped that we would have success anyway.

 

We baked the vanilla cookies first. Without chocolate, these cookies look anemic.

 

You know how when we made this recipe according to the actual directions, the dough was so runny that it barely held itself into cookie shapes? Well it was even runnier without the cocoa powder in there. If it wasn't the middle of the night, you could have seen daylight through them.

 

Well, let's put that pan of baked splatters aside and get to the real reason we're here today. We hoped that the coffee would make them a bit less runny than the vanilla ones, even if we could feel no difference while scooping it out.

 

Tragically, our featured cookies became what I had feared I'd get the whole time: one big melted-together megacookie. I could have saved a lot of time by just pressing the dough out into a square pan.

Figuring that the cookies may be thin but they are nevertheless edible, we cut them apart. It looks kind of like the underside of a turtle, doesn't it?

 

The resulting cookies tasted fantastic. Coffee and pumpkin spice go together like chocolate and peanut butter. We could not stop eating these. We had made the vanilla cookies in case the coffee cookies brought disappointment, but they were just so good that ate them all long before polishing off the vanilla ones (though all the cookies got eaten in haste).

However, removing the cocoa powder from the recipe made these cookies too runny and too buttery. You might think that would make them extra decadent, but in reality it made them greasy. We might try these again, cutting back on the butter a little bit and adding a little more flour so they bake into cookies instead of puddles. 

You might be thinking "There are a lot of cookie recipes that would come out exactly like you want! Why not just make one of those and add the coffee and chips to it?" I have three reasons for that. First, I have a lot more quarantine free time than I intended. Second, I try to tell myself I am good at baking (even if my results remain irregular). As someone who self-allegedly is good at baking, surely I can figure out how this recipe works and then alter it to do as I wish. Third, others in the house are enabling my cookie battiness. I suggested cracking open a cookbook and getting out another recipe. Someone else said. "No, no! This is a challenge."

And so, more (hopefully) lovely cookies will be forthcoming! With that said, these weren't bad aside from being far too thin. If you cut back on the butter by a spoon or two and press them into a pan to make bars, you would be delighted.

Pumpkin Spice Latte Brownies: or, The birth of a recipe

It's after Halloween, and Christmas has actually gotten a delayed start this year. The traditional American Christmas shopping season starts in August and has since before both the world wars. But in 2016, the fake pine, fake snow, and aggressive cinnamon fumes didn't appear in stores near me until November. It appears the absurdity of this year's election upstaged Christmas (which is astonishing given how many companies depend on holly jolly spending). Truly, every cloud has a silver lining- or at least a smoky gray one. Christmas is just a little more than two months away, and no one has managed to get enough airtime on any major network to shout about The War On Christmas^TM this year. Only one angry pamphlet about how some organization needs a six-figure donation to "Keep Christ In Christmas" has arrived in the mail. All of America's outrage seems aimed at the two blondes still fighting over who gets to spend the next four years at a lectern saying "My Fellow Americans," and no one has any left to dump on retail workers who utter "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas."
We at A Book of Cookrye are celebrating this unexpected extension of autumn with what marketers have made into the defining fall flavor: pumpkin spice!

I so wanted to dress as Pumpkin Spice for Halloween, but don't have any Uggs, couldn't borrow them from anyone, and was not about to spend that kind of money for a one-night costume.

Yes indeed, we are making pumpkin spice brownies.

Pumpkin Spice Latte Brownies ¼ c margarine 1½ c sugar 6 tbsp pumpkin 1 tsp mace ½ tsp salt ¾ tsp baking powder 1¼ c flour 1½ tsp cinnamon 1 tsp allspice ¾ tsp nutmeg 2 heaping tbsp instant coffee or espresso Heat oven to 350°. Line a 9" round or 8" square pan with foil, then grease it. If the coffee is in crystals rather than powder, pulverize it. You can just put it in a little bowl or cup and press it with your finger. Stir together the flour and baking powder. Melt the margarine. Stir in the sugar, then the mace and salt. Add the pumpkin, beat thoroughly. Lastly, stir in the flour. Spoon half of the batter in random places all over the pan. Stir the coffee, nutmeg, allspice, and cinnamon into the remaining batter. Spoon it into the gaps and voids that remain in the pan. Even out the batter and close any gaps without mixing the two colors. Using a knife (or the spoon handle), swirl the batter, smoothing as you go. Bake 25-30 minutes depending on how firm you want them, and cut while hot.

This actually took a lot of effort as we couldn't find any pumpkin spice brownie recipes online. There are a lot of recipes for chocolate brownies that contain canned pumpkin, and a lot of "pumpkin spice swirl" brownie recipes in which you basically make pumpkin pie filling and swirl it into chocolate brownie batter. Yet it seems no one has put in a recipe for pumpkin-spice flavored brownies. This surprised me almost as much as when I found out two of the biggest Internet food crazes have not collided to give us pumpkin-spice bacon (seriously, no one makes or sells it). And so, we decided to dig out a recipe for blondies and see if we couldn't twist it into pumpkin spice brownies. We were going to make pumpkin spice brownies or go through many cans of pumpkin while failing at it.
Our first attempt was based on some rumor making its way through Facebook right now. Apparently, if you dump a can of pumpkin and a box of brownie mix into a bowl, you end up with pumpkin brownies. Further research found this website of health nuts claiming you can can substitute canned pumpkin for the eggs and whatever fat went into a dessert recipe. Attempting that went exactly as expected.

We might have overdone it on the molasses here...

They don't look bad, but they were really gummy and rubbery. They actually tasted all right, but brownies should not bounce. However, we will note that they refused to go stale, not even after being left out on the counter for three days. Instead, they turned almost bread-like. So if for some reason you want to make dessert three days ahead and just leave it out, do try this substitution.

All right, this brings us to trial #2. With one exception, every good brownie recipe we've ever made contains a lot of butter. So, we reasoned, why not put the butter back in and only use pumpkin in place of the eggs? I mean, clearly removing the eggs didn't turn these brownies into inedible ruins- they were nearly something I'd actually admit to having made. Also, we decided to change out the brown sugar for white.

Take your healthy substitutes and shove them.

In the name of experimentation, we carefully considered butter vs. margarine vs. shortening instead of just picking one at random. Our first choice was butter because that is the default in all that we bake. However, the original recipe we are dickering with calls for shortening which does tend to make for more soft and gooey brownies. But shortening is just... well, it tastes like nothing but solid grease when you melt it. And I always feel kind of guilty whenever I put a huge glob of it in anything. The next choice was butter. We were about to melt the butter to begin the recipe when we remembered what happened when we accidentally ran out of butter, made a batch of brownies with margarine, and inadvertently ended up experimenting and finding out the difference between the two.

Therefore, margarine looked like the best choice.

This being pumpkin spice brownies, we then needed to add the spices. This is not the time to be shy with shakers; no one has ever said how much they like pumpkin-light-amount-of-seasonings.

And now, we're getting in touch with white girls across America. Bring forth the pumpkin!

That's... not a lot of pumpkin. If one is making banana bread, one tends to put a lot of banana in it. If one is making zucchini bread, one pulverizes as much zucchinis as one can get away with. But this is barely any pumpkin. It barely turned the batter orange.

Is it really pumpkin spice if it's not that trademarked shade of orange? All we have is a bowl of... brown. Maybe the flour would lighten it into a more correct color.

Well that's a little better.

At this point, we had the epiphany that led put the latte in the pumpkin spice latte brownies. Why make pumpkin spice brownies when we can make pumpkin spice latte brownies? It'd be as easy as adding instant coffee! However, we thought on further consideration, if we dump in coffee to make them into pumpkin spice latte brownies, we will never know how the pumpkin spice not-latte brownies would have turned out. We decided to do like we did with the maraschino party cake and split the difference. That way, we could try both without having to make two batches of brownies.

Dividing up the batter was easier than we thought it would be. The batter was thick enough we didn't even need to get out a second bowl (which we would then have to wash) to split it in half. And so, with a couple spoonfuls of pulverized coffee granules, we prepared to put the latte in pumpkin spice latte.

I can't lie, this tasted insanely good. And look how tantalizingly oozy and thick the batter is! However, adding the coffee powder ruined the correct pumpkin spice shade of orange. Worse, it didn't at least turn it a pretty shade of brown.

Seeing the stripe running down the center of the pan made us think- do we really have to do one or the other? Since we didn't have to do any extra work or get out any more dishes to make both pumpkin spice and pumpkin spice latte, it'd be the easiest thing in the world to just swirl the two together.

Well, we got the brownies into the oven, and they looked promising indeed. Both batters had tasted insanely good, and both of them looked like a batter should when we got it into the oven. Then, what should we see patiently waiting to go into the mixing bowl but this?

GAAAAAAAAH!

Well, we said to ourselves, it was too late to add eggs now. The batter was already baking. Furthermore, it had at least looked like brownie batter and not somehow wrong. Lastly, even if this did fail, we at least had cut the recipe down and therefore would not end up wasting a lot of ingredients.

We tentatively removed them from the oven and waited for them to cool. They looked all right, if slightly greasy. But the heck would we find when cutting them?

Brownies! Delicious, gooey, crackly-topped brownies! We were ecstatic as we ate one as soon as it had cooled enough not to cause burns. Sure, they were almost a soft paste than actual baked goods, but they would surely firm up as they cooled.
...or so we thought. As they cooled off, they proved not to be baked goods so much as a semi-set paste rather like most of our carrot cake failures and the still-regretted Diet Coke cake. We could have mashed the contents of the pan into a paste ball like this:

It actually makes better Play-Doh than those recipes for homemade Play-Doh.

The problem, we concluded, must be an excess of butter. It's not that we object to buttery desserts, but these were really greasy. They had failed in exactly the same way as many abysmal carrot cakes, and all of those had so much oil in them that they were more fat-flour paste than cakes. And so, we reduced the margarine.
While we were at attempting to fix the recipe, we increased all the ingredients because the last batch of brownies had been pathetically thin- and that was just one dinky round pan, so we couldn't even get out a smaller one. Doubling the recipe would have been too much for one pan, so we one-and-a-half'ed it instead. Also, because the idea had seemed so tantalizing, we decided to make them swirly! As aforementioned, the batter was very easy to divide in half. We didn't have to get out a second bowl which would need washing.

And so, having brought out the instant coffee, we produced swirly brownies!

That's a real letdown of a swirly pattern. You can barely tell it's there. It was even less visible when they were done. Seriously, you have to closely examine it to see that these are in fact supposed to be swirly brownies.

Well, they may not look pretty and swirly, but that wouldn't matter if they actually tasted good. They certainly looked delicious.

However, they were just as paste-like as the batch before. They weren't greasy like the previous attempt, but they were pumpkin-spice modeling clay nonetheless. And I know it wasn't from underbaking as they were in the oven until the edges burned. That said, they tasted amazing, so we deemed this endeavor worth pursuing into...
...Attempt four! If they were too paste-like and the problem was no longer excess grease, perhaps more flour is needed? Also, while we were at it, we really didn't like how invisible the marbling had been. I mean, what's the point of spending all that time (like, an entire two minutes) doing swirly patterns if baking renders them invisible? And so, we stole a page from RetroRuth of Mid-Century Menu, who made a pumpkin pie with mace instead of cinnamon which was apparently extremely orange instead of an orange-ish brown. Mace is expensive, but we already had a shaker of it which has followed us ever since we made snow muffins. If it has gathered dust and roach droppings this long, no one would miss it if we used the entire shaker in successive batches of pumpkin-spice experimentation. Instead of adding all the spices at once, we would add only mace to the batter. Then, once half of it was spooned into the pan, we would add all the other, browner spices with the coffee. 

We should have known this wouldn't be the batch that sent us running into the street shouting Eureka when the batter was thick enough that swirling it made holes.

However, our spice-splitting efforts paid off in the form of visible marbliness! Granted, it's the same color as the sides of the '70s TV lurking in the back so many people's old photos, but at least you can see it.

However, while we had fixed the pastiness in this batch, the greasiness in the batch before, and the gumminess in the batch before that, these were bland. You couldn't taste the pumpkin or the coffee. We had taken a promising recipe and turned it into a pain-in-the-ass spice cake.
By now, this was a challenge, which brings us to... attempt #5!
If the most recent batch had too much flour in it, and the batch before too little, we changed the amount of flour to be halfway between the two. Also, we added a lot more coffee granules so the dark stripes would be really dark- besides, you could barely taste the coffee in the previous batch.

We hadn't tasted them yet, but at least they looked pretty.

As someone said when I told him what I was making, "You're making white girl chow?"

And.. heck yes! We have success! They taste like lovely swirls of coffee and pumpkin. They're chewy, but not like paste. Sometimes experimentation pays off. Happy Fall, everyone! You can contact all of us at A Book of Cookrye using the address below: