Homemade brownies

Well, I can feel yesterday's 1 km run in my left knee, but not in the place I'm most concerned about and not as a sharp pain, so I'll try again tomorrow if the rain is not too heavy.

Recently, I made brownies trying to follow my base recipe that I think like and wasn't happy with the result, so I tried again today and it worked out okay, so I'm making a note here.

I melted 57 g (1/4 cup) of unsaltedbutter with 40 g (about 1/4 cup) of (Dutch process) cocoa powder. Not sure what the fat percentage is, but it's Cuoca's powder, so I trust it, although it's my first bag from them. Prior (of course), I measured out 100 g (1/2 cup) of sugar (Japanese table sugar, which is slightly finer than granular sugar, I think), mixed up 1 large egg (which I don't know how much that is, since I usually use medium, which are about 33 g of white and 18 g of yoke, but the whole L eggs, with shell are 68 g), and measured out 47 g (3/8 cup) of "Violet" "weak" flour with 42 g of chopped walnuts, since the pecans are all gone now. Also, I sprayed six 7.5 cm diameter 10-petal brioche forms with spray oil and floured them well with "strong" (bread) flour.

The chocolate and butter is pretty thick (I turn off the minimum gas flame just before the last butter finishes melting) and gets thicker with the sugar, and only gets a little thinner with the egg and then 2.5 ml of dark rum (because that's the only flavor I have: vanilla essence is really expensive, although that wouldn't stop me if I really thought I needed it). Finally, I preheat my convection oven to 180 degC, mix in the flour and nuts until I can't see undissolved flour and then use a rubber spatula to scrape it into the forms. The batter is really thick, so it would have taken more effort to keep out the bubbles and level it out, but it's all good. And I did a better job of making sure nuts got in every one than last time.

I baked them for 30 minutes. This is exactly the time and temperature that my Better Homes and Garden cookbook says, so normally I should crank that down to 170 degC or decrease the time for the convection oven, but for this recipe, this works better. Note that the original recipe takes 1 oz of unsweetened chocolate, which is a lot less chocolate and but more cocoa butter and produces actual brownies, since it is a fudge brownies recipes, whereas my change makes these more cake brownies, but not like the BH&G cake brownies recipe, which is spongy, no thanks.

Another mistake I avoided from last time was waiting for them to cool (because I wanted to eat diner) before taking them out of the forms. You need to put on oven mitts and shake them out right away. That's also a good time to roll them in powdered sugar (well, okay actually they are still too hot, but as soon as you can stand), which I much prefer to frosting them (plus I had leftover powdered sugar from similar efforts that I wouldn't use for cooking).

So next, besides buying cake, I need to try the 14 cm tart form with the financier recipe and defrosted egg white. I'm saving the fresh egg white (from not fresh eggs, deliberately) for the next attempt at a macaron-type cake. This (the financier) worked well once before, when I butter the form, except it didn't come out will, so I'll use spray and flour like today and see if that works better.