More Brownies for the Fourth

This weekend went really well. My mom had been visiting for the week so she and I and my friend from down the street cooked out on Friday. I'm really enjoying my little gas grill. We had ribs, hamburgers, and bratwursts this time around. I want to thank Anne from Kitchen Bliss for the tips on making ribs. She has a post about a rub and how to cook them starting in the oven first. They turned out really tasty.

I also baked brownies from a subtle hint from my friend. This time I made the Bittersweet recipe from Alice Medrich. It calls for using an ice bath to cool the brownies. They were delicious. I think I liked them better than the other four I made last month. Very rich and gooey. I used 85% dark chocolate and they were awesome, if I do say so myself. And to top them off I made home made ice cream. I used skim milk and Half and Half which works pretty well. It gets a little icy, and stays in soft serve form but still tastes good and with less fat, so I'll take it. We used a little almond extract in it too. I love my almond extract... (in the picture above, I topped off the ice cream and brownie with homemade hot fudge, another Alice recipe)

My mom had told me a friend of hers had put in a request for peanut butter cookies. The request was not so much for me to make but I made them anyway. I used the School Cafeteria Peanut Butter cookie recipe on Allrecipes.com. I scaled down the recipe to 30 cookies and weighed the measurements on my scale. I had made these before to good reviews so I tried them again. I remember loving the cookies we got at school usually on Friday's along with our pizza. And these do closely resemble my memory, but I've come to the realization that most things never taste as good as we remember them. I felt like I wanted more peanut butter taste. So, after making 32 cookies and still having batter left over, I decided to make a bar cookie with the rest and layer with a peanut butter filling that I found on Cookie Madness and then topped them off with the recipe for peanut butter cups that I've seen on various sites which combine the chocolate and peanut butter together. They were quite messy to lift out of the pan but again tasted really good, and I got the pb flavor I was looking for and the chocolate just added even more decadence to them. I've brought some in to work to share. I shouldn't keep all of these goodies around my house. I will eat them.

Back to simpler things

I just wanted to quickly update on my baking endeavors. Last week I made some white chocolate chip cookies with amaretto soaked cranberries. The recipe calls for brandy soaked berries but I like amaretto and didn't have any brandy. They still turned out pretty tasty though. I also upped the amount of brown sugar and lowered the white sugar. Next time I'll leave out the extra liqueur because they cookies were a bit flat.

This weekend I did my own little taste test experiment with brownies. I have pretty much always stuck with the boxed mixes. They're easy and still taste good to me. But I'm trying to break from my comfort zone and try new things. Brownies are not difficult to make but the recipes I tried did step up the process a little by involving a double boiler. I tried three different recipes and two types of cocoa with one of them for a total of four types of brownies. I made Alice Medrich's Best Cocoa Brownies one with dutch process cocoa and the other with natural cocoa. I also made Alton Brown's cocoa brownies and then Dorie Greenspan's Bittersweet brownies. I meant to keep everything basic and go by the recipe exactly but I found myself not able to resist adding a tad bit of almond extract to Dorie's recipe. OMG, were they good. I still don't have a favorite yet out of the results. I think I need to do more tastings. Dorie's definitely gets most gooey and I liked the natural cocoa over the dutch process which surprised me because the blackness of the latter really appeals to me.

I also barbecued out again this weekend. My neighbor friend came down to eat with me. I made sangria to go with it all and we had a very enjoyable time. I like throwing things on the grill to see what the outcome is. I tried tomatoes, bell peppers, asparagus and mushrooms this time along with pork chops and chicken. I just have to keep watch because flare ups happen quickly on my little grill and cause the food to get charred more than I'd necessarily like.

So, a more basic weekend with no real problems. Just yumminess.