When Bad Brownies Happen To Good People

I've been told that I'm terrible at admitting my shortcomings. For the most part, it's true. Right here, right now, I am going to take a big step and admit a HUGE blunder I had tonight.

I went to a dinner party and was asked to bring a dessert. I fully embraced this task, deciding on brownies and perusing recipes online. There was some 85% Lindt in the house that I procured from the Fancy Foods Expo that I've been waiting to use in a baked good. I wanted to put espresso in them. The dreams were big.

The call came as I was getting ready to leave the office. My roommate had taken herself to the hospital with the worst illness she'd had in recent memory. Naturally, my priorities immediately adjusted. I jetted from the office, got on the bus, got a call saying she was done, ran into the house, and jetted to get her from the medical center. We stopped on the way home to get her prescriptions, it was 7:00 when we got back to the house.

I decided I'd just bring brownie material to the dinner party and make them there. I cased the house packing up my ingredients. We didn't have chocolate chips like I thought. The Lindt bar was only 3.5 ounces (minus the nibbles that Dubs and I had) instead of the requisite 5 oz. No vanilla. I was okay with it. I figured I'd just shuffle a few things and it would work out. I'm confident in the brownie zone.

In retrospect I don't think the recipe was very good. It called for one cup of flour which seemed like a lot from the get-go but I'm no chef, so who am I to judge? I just followed the recipe, minus the vanilla. A ton of butter, sugar, bittersweet chocolate, I substituted truffles for chocolate chips, cutting them into small pieces, everything should have been rosy. The batter, according to one Brian Permutt, was tasty- the boy licked the bowl. I was feeling good when they went into the oven. When it was time to pull them out, I noticed their color was kind of muted. It was certainly not a dark brown, rather light, almost ashen. That should have been all the hint I needed. When I cut them open I discovered that the texture was light and cakey. They were pretty bland, certainly not rich, certainly not fudgy. The general consensus was that they were below average. A few people commented that they liked them because they weren't as rich as usual brownies. Someone else said she liked "cardboardy things" and thought these were pretty good.

In short, I failed. I actually pulled them off the table because I was embarrassed. They found their way back to the table because people got drunk and stopped caring that they were eating garbage. I was very uncomfortable. I'm trying to think back to all the ways they could have been improved. The batter was very misleading. It was a nice color and supposedly tasted good. Why was the baking process such a disaster? Needless to say, I'm sorry for all the people that I hurt with those horrible brownies. There is nothing worse than putting good chocolate to shame, or leaving out something that suggests it is chocolaty and delicious but really is "earthy" tasting at best. It was like a fat free dessert, one that looked maybe alright, but was a total betrayal.

It was a rough night but as I always say, live and learn, Assassin. Live and learn.