brownie fail

Sometimes you have a great idea that works out marvelously.

Sometimes you have a great idea that fails miserably.

Lovely crystalization, wouldn't you say?

This is a tale of the latter.

I hadn’t eaten or given away all those mints I made for Independence Day, and I wanted to get them out of my freezer. My brilliant idea? Use them in cream-cheese swirl brownies.

I picked David Lebovitz’s recipe, knowing it would be a good one. After checking out his ingredients for the cream cheese filling (cream cheese? check.)(sugar? check.)(vanilla extract? mint instead, but check.)(egg yolk? negative.), I decided it was worth a shot to add a yolk and blend until everything came together. Also driving this experiment was my knowledge of the color wheel--red plus blue makes purple, a color I enjoy very much.

Holy lilac-tinted ooze, Batman!

So, what were the results? Thanks for asking! I think the photos speak for themselves, but in case the images aren’t enough, I’ll give you a description of what I pulled from the oven: The outer edges were baked quite nicely, but that’s where the good news ends. The middle was still essentially in liquid form, with the top crust floating on a sea of purple-hued cream cheese. Between the edge and the iceberg of baked brownie crust, a bubbling circle of said cream cheese threatened to take over the entire pan.

Waiter, there's a crater in my brownie...

What was I to do? If I baked it further, the edges would’ve become as hard as a rock. I tried to cut the middle out so it could continue to bake, but that just didn’t work. So, I abandoned the pesky brownies. It pained me, but I did it.

No doubt the batter was undercooked, so I refrained from eating the entire batch myself. 'Tis a sad day when something I make can in no way be salvaged. In hindsight, I realize what I should've done was bake regular brownies and use the broken-down cream cheese mints as a frosting. Duly noted.