sweet – Cook Instead

The Only Brownie Recipe

Hello all,

It is August, the Sunday of months. A time when you’re meant to be relaxing, but you’re excruciatingly aware of everything that’s coming up soon (school starting, people coming back from vacation, Things Having to Get Done, etc).

(January’s Monday (obviously), and February’s Tuesday, because it’s not Monday but you can’t believe it’s somehow this early in the week/year still (Tuesdays are bullshit.) Saturday is the only real day of rest in my book, and it’s both the week between Christmas and New Year’s when time doesn’t exist, and also July. But we’re getting into the weeds here.)

My big point is, I’m taking August off. (I know it’s already August. Scheduling is my passion. Shut up.)

I’m taking August off like that weird French stereotype in the second new Muppets movie, which I never understood because the joke seems to be that he… takes too much vacation? As though that’s not aspirational in the extreme?

This is an extremely tiny image of a joke whose punchline seems to be that French people enjoy taking long vacations with their families, which is… bad? I have never understood this.

I’ll see you guys in September, on the other side of a mid-pandemic cross-oceanic apartment transfer, which isn’t listed as an Olympic event but, in my opinion, should be. Have you guys been watching? There’s a kid from Doncaster who can taekwondo his foot into the back of another guy’s head while facing him. The human body is a miracle.

Until then, please enjoy these perfect brownies.

These are the only brownies I will ever make or be making in the future. These are the only brownies I have ever made that don’t have the word “cheesecake” in them somewhere. These are the only brownies I am interested in making.

These are the brownies that make me shake my head whenever the Bake-Off contestants make some kind of unholy Cherry Bakewell Brownie disaster (with FROSTING on it, for some ungodly reason.) These brownies are so damn easy, even APART from being developed by a true Hero and Inspiration.

They might have been the first thing I learned to make that wasn’t mac and cheese from a box, or maybe fairy cakes.

I made a double recipe of these in a 10-inch square cake pan and overcooked them slightly, which is why they’re, uh, together in the photos. Usually, these have a crackly candied lid under which is basically a chocolate lava duvet studded with walnuts that you pick apart with your hands like a little raccoon.

The fact that these have “sliced” into “shapes” is the exception, not the rule. These are usually Brownie Rubble (Barney’s wacky cousin who owns a bakery), and that’s just fine with me. Make yourself a pan and dig in.

See you in a month!

Katharine Hepburn’s Brownies

Adapted from the woman herself, via PBS

Ingredients:

· 2 squares (2 oz.) unsweetened baker’s chocolate. You can substitute ½ cup cocoa, but melted chocolate works MUCH better. Cocoa powder is a paltry substitute when you can use actual melted chocolate.

· 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter. Yes.

· 1 cup sugar – These can err on the side of sweet, so if you don’t have baker’s chocolate and use bittersweet, do half the sugar and taste as you go because you don’t want them too sweet. Also, if you’re doubling the recipe, take the sugar down a smidge.

· 2 eggs

· 1/4 cup flour

· 1 teaspoon vanilla

· Pinch of salt

· 1 cup roughly chopped walnuts or pecans. I always say that nuts are optional, but they’re not here (Sorry Caroline). They contribute a beautiful contrast to the fudginess that takes these into Legendary territory.

Method:

Melt butter with the cocoa or chocolate together in a heavy saucepan over medium low, whisking constantly till blended.

Remove from heat and stir in the sugar.

Whisk in the eggs and vanilla.

Stir in flour, salt and walnuts.

Mix well.

Pour into a well-buttered and floured 8-inch square baking pan.

Bake at 325 degrees for about 40 minutes till a toothpick inserted in the center comes out clean.

Cool completely and cut into squares. These brownies are very fudgy and may be somewhat difficult to slice cleanly; use a sharp knife and a spatula to help them loosen from the baking dish. (Put the pan on your lap, put a spoon in the pan, put the spoon in your mouth.)

Tiramisu

This week it’s a billion degrees in the UK, but luckily this is a recipe that requires almost nothing from you. This is truly a dessert for people who don’t cook – it requires no heat, and nary an egg gets cracked. If you can whip cream and dunk cookies, you can make tiramisu.

It’s also my grandpa’s favorite (along with pecan pie.) My grandpa is a man who wants at all times to be driving a gigantic 50’s-era Cadillac, chewing on an expensive cigar, on his way to a swingin’ jazz gig, or maybe the theater. The three-martini lunch was invented for this man, so it makes sense that the Grown Uppest dessert is his favorite one.

I used to hate it as a kid, and I suspect I’m not alone. It looks like a big sweet cream cake (and it is), but it’s got all of these grown-up flavors: coffee and booze and NON-sweet chocolate? What the heck is the point of non-sweet chocolate?

Well, once you grow up and get indoctrinated into the cult of enjoying booze and coffee, you find out.

Poached Peaches

Dear Everyone,

As short and sweet as the last few posts have been, this one is even shorter and sweeter, because my big fancy new project launches on Wednesday and I’ve been immersing myself in the world of the old and the weird. Come along, if you’re so inclined!

Luckily for you, you’re getting a threefer this week, because you can make three (or more!) delicious things from one simple recipe: Nigella Lawson’s Poached Peaches.

A good peach in the summertime is a thing of pure beauty – it’s basically sunshine in the palm of your hand.

A bad peach sucks. We’ve all had them.

In AP Psych we covered a study on addiction: pigeons are trained to push a lever and get a treat, but if the lever keeps giving them treats they’ll eventually get bored and stop, so the only way to get the pigeons to consistently keep pushing said lever is to only give treats at random intervals. (See also: push notifications, slot machines.)

This is how nature gets us to keep eating peaches – in the hope that between all the overripe and underripe, the sour and the mealy, we’ll get that one perfect sunshiney peach. Maybe this time, big money big money, momma needs a new pair of shoes.

Well, worry no more, my dear friends. Nigella’s cracked it. You can muscle even the hardest, weirdest peaches into a state of delectability through the simple process of poaching them in a simple sugar syrup. It is the Peach Fixer.

Lemon-Lime Cordial for Gimlets (and more)

We’re keeping it short and sweet this week, folks, which is coincidentally also the way I like this drink.

A few weeks ago, Joe Wicks was the guest on Off Menu, a podcast I listen to where two comedians ask their guests what their dream meal would be, course by course. Joe was delightful because he’s known in the UK as the pandemic fitness instructor guy and all he chose to eat was burgers, fries, cheese, and alcohol, which I deeply respect and which is super realistic.

Also, he and his daughter like to make what’s known in their household as an “early gin-ton” (gin and tonic at or before 5pm). His daughter’s a toddler, so she’s just getting ton and lime, but I love the idea of an early gin-ton for starting your evening off right. Earlier the better, in the summertime.

Cheers! You have no idea how much I wanted to make this the featured image for this post.
Pictured: Joe Lycett (comedian) in a speedboat on the Thames on his way to host the Great British Sewing Bee, the reality show of the week in my household. Important: this is not Joe Wicks, fitness instructor, nor is it a gimlet. Whatever. It’s about the vibe.

Iced Coffee

It’s ten thousand degrees outside, every part of you is drenched in sweat, and, like a dog or a performing seal, you need a treat in order to perform whatever new task is expected of you.

You need a good treat.

Not a low-fat smoothie or a Diet Tab or God forbid a protein shake. You need something delicious with enough pow and zap to launch your dilapidated meat corpse into whatever the next activity of the day is.

Hopefully there’s air conditioning. But even if there’s not? There’s iced coffee.

Dave’s Sweet Tea

I’ve been dreaming about outdoor patio lunches, about fancy white tablecloths and club sandwiches that come wrapped in paper napkins, about standing outside a taco truck shoveling carnitas drenched in hot green salsa and crisp white onions and fresh lime juice into my face at 2AM.

I’ve been fantasizing about giant fuck-off Cobb salads served with a haystack of herby, cheesy skinny fries for the table, and barbecue stands handing out waxed-paper cartons filled with towering piles of smoky, sticky brisket. And a pickle on the side.

I’ve been thinking about sitting on the hood of the car outside the Dairy Queen at dusk, eating a chocolate dipped cone and talking about nothing and watching the thunderclouds roll in. I’ve been meditating on hot dogs.

I’m deep in Summer Outdoor Food Nostalgia, is what it is. We’ll be diving deep into this fantasy-based cooking in the coming weeks. Get ready for cherry pie, and pulled pork, and breakfast burritos and maybe donuts? And limeade and chicken shawarma and really good cold sandwiches for when it’s too hot to even think about turning on a burner on the stove, much less the oven.

A summertime eatin’-stuff moodboard: drive-thrus, puddin pie, Ferris Bueller, Brad Pitt eating in every scene of Ocean’s 11, fresh cherries, Corny the Sweetcorn at the Urbana Sweetcorn Festival, who is a known associate of this blog.

But you’re not getting through any of the above without a drink. Good, cold drinks are the cornerstone of summer eating: horchata, iced coffee, lemonade, milkshakes. The ever-wonderful movie theater Coke, which is essentially syrup poured over a mountain of crushed ice. Ideal.

Sweet Tea is movie theater Coke’s mellower cousin – you can control the sweetness at the beginning, with how much honey you put in, and at the end, with how much ice you serve it with.

Easy Mother’s Day Desserts You Can Make on the Fly

This week, we’re getting Mom something she actually wants: Some Goddamn Dessert. THREE Cook Instead recipes for the price of one, only at Shondaland. Go check it out!

Ghosties (Chocolate Chip Meringues with Toasted Walnuts)

At its best, cooking is a magic trick. Clearly you can make something amazing with a beautiful, organic, lovingly massaged pork butt, but using fancy raw materials means everyone expects mind-blowing results. It’s so much more satisfying when you start with something unprepossessing. If you’re a magician making a tiger jump through a flaming hoop, it’s way better if you know that tiger started life as two raw, jelloid egg whites in a metal bowl.

Luckily for all of us, two egg whites and half a cup of sugar will net you almost two dozen startlingly chic little pure-white light-as-air cookies with all of the natural architectural sophistication of the majestic iceberg. You don’t even have to pipe anything.

Cupcakes with Orange Icing

What can I say about cupcakes: They are small cups of cake. By now everyone knows that cupcakes, like donuts, have been absolutely done to death: filled, topped, swirled, glazed, drizzled, sprinkled.

I, for one, am over it. They’re only small cakes, Darryl, they can’t be expected to carry all that extra foofaraw and still taste good. If you want to make six caramels, a streusel, and a swirled marshmallow filling, you totally should do that, but you should do it Somewhere Else.

What I want is a small buttery cake with a lively, fresh icing, about the size of the cup of very good tea. That’s it. Make Cupcakes About Cake Again 2021.

Easy One-Bowl Chocolate Cake with Boozy Chocolate Frosting

Were you ever kind of jealous of the boy in Matilda who had to eat an entire chocolate cake with his hands in front of the whole school as a punishment? I know I was.

I used to take every chocolate option at the sundae bar – ice cream, sauce, M&Ms, even chocolate sprinkles. Chocolate sprinkles: what sadist thought those up? You’re just gonna make these things brown and pretend it’s chocolate? Are you kidding me?

Making Stuff Brown and Pretending it’s Chocolate: The Story of All Chocolate Cake Everywhere. You can’t stop me now, I’m already up on my soapbox.

The dominant cultural narrative is that chocolate cake is the best, the richest, the most decadent. Restaurants are selling huge slabs of Seven-Layer Death By Chocolate Devil’s Food Indulgence cake, with ganache filling the approximate taste and texture of brown shoe polish. I have seen grown adults take dry little square nubs of brownie from the spread in the breakroom, just to feel something during an all-day meeting, even if that “something” is disappointment. (It was me, I took the Sadness Brownie.) Red velvet cake was a trend: that only happens in a culture deeply divorced from what actual chocolate should taste like.*

Think about the chocolate cakes that you like best. Answers on the board, please, Family Feud style:

Flourless chocolate cake
Chocolate lava cake
Some kind of cream cheese brownie situation?

Flourless chocolate cake is just a mousse on steroids, and I’m not mad at that, but it doesn’t count. My grandad makes a chocolate whiskey gateau that’s essentially a large creamy slab of alcoholic truffle filling, with ladies’ fingers stuck on the outside for modesty’s sake. Is it perfect? Yes. Is it cake? Uhhhh…

Chocolate lava cakes – or fondant cakes as they’re called here – only work because you get the tender comfort of cake wrapped around the gooey richness of a chocolate fudge sauce. They’re hot, they’re tasty, and they’re disqualified: you can’t defend chocolate cake when your favorite kind is 70% sauce.

Cream cheese brownies are amazing, but 1. Brownies aren’t cake and 2. They’re good because of the contrast (we’ll be coming back to that).

It makes sense! The essence of chocolate, which is rich, luxurious intensity, is diluted by the essence of cake, which is light, tender delicacy. This relationship is just doomed to fail. These two love each other too hard and their child… sucks. There’s a reason the best brownie recipe in the world only calls for ¼ cup of flour.

But why were we promised a perfect chocolate cake that just doesn’t exist? Where does that leave us? Where is the rich, dark, soil-damp chocolate cake of our Augustus Gloop dreams?