French Chocolate Brownies

Another Tuesday rolls around, meaning it's time for another Tuesdays with Dorie post. This week's creation is French Chocolate Brownies (given, there's nothing particularly French about these brownies aside from the fact that they were first made by Dorie in France).

I consider any grocery run where I can stop into a Trader Joe's and walk out with a giant stick of chocolate to be a good grocery trip. I'm actually surprised that with all this baking I've been doing lately, I haven't had to buy any until now.

After chopping down the chocolate into fine pieces, it was time to use the bowl-on-pot double broiler method. For some reason, Dorie's wording scared me in this part - I've melted chocolate many times this way before, but she made it seem that if it stayed on for just a few seconds too long, you'd have burnt chocolate everywhere. It didn't give me any troubles, especially not after adding in the butter...I'm just not too sure why she worried about the chocolate burning so badly.

It was time to play with flames again as another batch of rum raisins were made. It's the first time I've heard of raisins being put into brownies, but it definitely came out as a benefit (and I don't even particularly like raisins - I don't not like them, I just don't love them). I added the 1 1/2 T. (homemade) dark rum that Dorie suggests, heated it over medium heat for a while, warned my roommates (who have never seen this before) to not singe their hair, lit the lighter, annnd...nothing. Damn, the heat pulled all the alcohol off already. Well, now I look stupid, and my roommates don't get to see raisins on fire with a blue flame. What to do? Well, add another couple tablespoons, and light it on fire right away, of course! Fortunately, this either didn't affect the brownies, or it may have made them even better - they taste fabulous, with barely a hint of the rum in the brownies themselves.

Baking and everything else via Dorie's recipe went fine. If I were to do this again, I'd have probably thrown some pecans on top, or inside the batter, just because I still have a bunch sitting around the house. After having thrown in the extra rum though, I didn't want to do too much to upset the baking gods. I don't know my boundaries yet!

I let the brownies cool overnight, then cut the mass into 16 2"x2" squares. After stealing a couple of them for a breakfast of champions, and letting my roommates do the same, I stored the rest in tupperware in the freezer - Dorie says they will be fine there for approximately 2 months, and I have a request from family to start storing some of these concoctions for family visits.

Recipe: Baking: From My Home to Yours, Dorie Greenspan, pp. 92-93