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.