TWD—White Chocolate Brownies and Other Stuff

Our TWD recipe this week is White Chocolate Brownies, chosen by Marthe of Culinary Delights.  She’ll have the recipe.  I halved the recipe and get this---followed the recipe exactly.  There’s not even any “except for this” or “except for that”.  I even happened to find some good raspberries on sale.  I don’t really like meringue, but I even thought I’d play along and do just as the recipe says.

Bummer that they didn’t really turn out well!  I baked the “brownies” (it’s really more like thin, tender cake) for 40 minutes.  The meringue looked nice and toasty and I didn’t want to have it burn.  There really is/was no way to tell if they are done.  Many on the TWD P&Q mentioned problems with their brownies not being baked all the way through and the only reason I didn’t go longer is since I halved the recipe, I thought they wouldn’t take as long to bake.  Still, 40 minutes is more than Dorie’s suggested time of 30-35 minutes.  In fact, I’d have to say that the edge pieces were almost starting to be a little too done, while the middle was seriously just batter.  The flavor of the brownie is great.  I liked the not-too-overpowering raspberry here and there.  I’m just a little disappointed that the recipe didn’t work as it’s printed.  I even made the raspberry coulis.  The rest of that will be good on some pancakes or something.  I did swirl some in to some plain Greek yogurt a few days ago, then piled the yogurt with fresh blueberries and raspberries.  Mmm.

The meringue sure puffed up in the oven.

I knew I should have gone with my gut instinct and made little mini brownies in my mini muffin tin.  I think they would have worked well with one berry in each one.  Then instead of the meringue, just a little dollop of whipped cream with maybe another berry on top.  I may try that sometime if I need  nice little bite-sized desserts, because again, the cake was good.  Scott ate a lot of the edge pieces.  He ate the ones used as my photo model.  All the middle pieces were thrown out.  I’m glad I only made half a recipe.  I’m not mad, I feel like I sound so short about it.  Live and learn.  I also heard that the brownies baked without the meringue were much better and timely about their stint in the oven.  Wish I would have baked them without it.

I’m going to move on to other things now.  Catch ya next week with another Tuesday’s With Dorie recipe.

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We’ve had a lot going on over the last week or so.  Summer is in full swing here.  Besides it being way too hot already, the boys are out of school for the summer.

Scott graduated 6th grade.  (I don’t remember any kind of a graduation hoorah when I finished 6th grade, but it’s a big thing now).  Gotta celebrate moving on from elementary school to middle school (which was called junior high where I come from, I think junior high sounds more cool).

We felt pretty happy that we were able to get Scott to wear jeans that day and a Polo shirt.  (He would wear shorts and a t-shirt the rest of his life if he could!)  I found the whole “ceremony” quite interesting.  The girls (11-12 years old) mostly all wore dresses that to me looked like prom dresses, a lot of them strapless, really high heels and boy, the girls are a lot more “developed” that I ever remember or thought 11 year olds are!  Anyway, we’re proud of Scott and know he’ll do great in 7th grade.  The school he will be attending when we move to Utah is brand new, they may not even be done building it yet.  He is going to start playing the drums.  That will be great for Scott, he beats on and plays drums on EVERYTHING.  He actually has really good rhythm.

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Parker became a Bear in Cub Scouts.  He would be an Eagle already if it was possible!  Parker loves Scouts.  He constantly wants to be working on things in his Cub Scout books. 

The theme for pack meeting was “In The Spotlight”, the boys got to share their talents.  Parker made a poster of some of his drawings.  It was so cute to hear him tell about them.  Parker is certainly not afraid of the “spotlight”.

Great job, Parker!  (We didn’t take very good pictures or very many at pack meeting.)

I brought the treat for the pack meeting.  To go along with the theme, I made star sugar cookies and star shaped Rice Krispies Treats.  They were gobbled up. Here’s a link to my favorite sugar cookies and icing recipe.

In continuing with Scout stuff, he recently made a wooden napkin holder with Kevin’s help.  And he painted it, too.  We think it looks awesome.

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On the left, two sweet lil’ strawberries we found in a patch we didn’t know existed in the back of this duplex we’re in right now.  On the right, a huge conjoined strawberry from the farmers’ market. 

Lovin’ our Farmers’ Market!