Chocolatey goodness

Friday, February 13, 2009

I would much rather eat cheese than chocolate, but every now and then I get in the mood for something chocolatey.  I really like good brownies (as should be clear from my myriad posts about B.T. Brownies), but I rarely make them myself.  The box mix variety just don’t excite me very much, and making brownies from scratch is something I am generally not motivated to do.  But when I get a new cookbook, I browse for recipes…and the Blue Eggs and Yellow Tomatoes cookbook has a recipe for one pot brownies.  How could I resist?

As it turns out, making brownies from scratch doesn’t have to be a big production.  The one pot recipe is simple: throw some chocolate and butter in a saucepan and melt it down over low heat.  Add sugar, eggs, salt, and vanilla after cooling the chocolate a bit, and then stir in flour.  See? Simple.  It also seemed like a good recipe to experiment with for the Farm to Philly Alternative Sweeteners challenge.

Being new to the idea of substituting sweeteners for regular sugar, it had to be baby steps.  I considered using honey, except that I read that with honey you need to decrease the volume of liquids in the recipe to compensate for adding more liquid (honey).  I’m not ready to futz around with that yet.  I did, though, have some locally grown/produced maple sugar from the Fair Food Farmstand in my cabinet.  Again, I stress that I’m making baby steps: I replaced half the regular sugar with maple sugar…mostly because I just wasn’t sure what to expect from the taste.

The maple sugar ended up really enhancing the taste of the brownies, especially since I threw in some locally grown cranberries.  The brownies are very chocolatey, very rich, and sweet-tart.  Delicious!

In addition to the maple sugar and cranberries, the butter, eggs, and flour used are also locally grown.