Progress

I made another batch of brownies yesterday and made some progress. I followed a basic Devil's Food cake recipe. I left out the baking soda and replaced the butter with a 3:2 oil and water mix. It seemed like my dry mix was the same amount as two boxes of brownie mix so I kept the two eggs. This time I had to spread the batter in the pan rather than pour it out like before.

The result? I updated my requirements in the previous post to include moistness. This new batch was not moist. But they did have that fudge quality I was looking for. I didn't get the flaky top like I wanted but I did get a crunchy top rather than the cake-like top from the previous batch. There was a wonderful chocolate aroma but not as much chocolate taste as I would have expected.

Dinah's comment was that they tasted like Betty Crocker's.

So I'm feeling good about this experiment. I need to tweak the ingredients some I think. I'll have to ponder how. It feels like I need more liquid or more fat or both. I think I need to compare my dry weight ratios with a box mix and see if I am adding enough oil and water. Six ounces of oil and four ounces of water seemed like a lot, but maybe it wasn't. I also might want to replace half of the cocoa powder with baking chocolate. I think this would add more flavor but also increase part of the fat content with cocoa butter hopefully adding some moistness.

Other options to explore include replacing the water with milk or substituting part of the sugar with light corn syrup. The previous recipe indicated that the corn syrup addition provided chewiness.