Baking Brownies, Um, I mean Chocolate Cake

I make brownies every now and again. It's the recipe from the Joy of Cooking by Irma Rombauer and Marion Rombauer Becker. It is my favourite recipe because it is simple and produces excellent results with very little effort. The only problem I have with it is that I lack nerve and therefore I fail every once in a while to pull the tray out of the oven in time (in my oven that usually means 20 minutes) when I use the usual (6" by 9") heavy pan I have.

If everything goes as planned in the preparation, and I do remember to keep an eye on the clock then I usually manage to steel myself and turn the oven off on time so that I get the brownies I prefer: slightly fudgy and extremely chocolate-ly (thanks in no small measure to substituting Van Houten's cocoa powder for cooking chocolate mixed into the flour. Van Houten's cocoa also happens to be remarkably cost-effective and I have yet to taste better results from any other chocolate or cocoa).

For anyone who has never baked brownies, but has tried baking cakes, the reason why this is unnerving is that brownies are best taken out when still not quite cooked which means the skewer test does not work unlike with cakes. It seems as if one is not fully cooking the batter and one will end up with partially cooked batter instead of squidgy brownies. Usually I manage to resist the pressure to leave it in longer and get my preferred result.

However, this time, I lost my nerve again because instead of consulting the recipe and going by the book, I decided to wing it and see I could remember the recipe. I did. I managed to remember all the ingredients and weighed them all out accurately. I managed to remember that half a cup of butter meant 4 ounces of butter duly melted in the microwave. And so on. The only thing I did different was the sequence in which I usually put in the ingredients. I reversed the usual sequence of mixing in the cocoa-flour mixture and the melted butter. The result: the batter ended up looking and tasting remarkably like chocolate butter cream. It usually looks a lot darker and has a stiffer consistency.

So instead of baking it for the usual 20 minutes at 180 C, I ended up leaving it in for 25 minutes and turned off the over and left it in for another 10 minutes. To those of you who are wondering how on earth I managed to make the logical leap to conclude that baking it longer will cure the batter of this error, I can only say, I thought that since it was more creamy than it was supposed to be, I should bake it longer as it would be impossibly smudgy otherwise.

The result: chocolate cake. It doesn't taste bad at all. It's a decent chocolate cake. But it is not a pan of brownies. I shall now have to rescue it by mashing raspberries and serving that along side the cake to make up for that. That of course is simply an excuse for eating up the glorious tangy raspberries with chocolate, one of my favourite ways of eating chocolate.