There it sits, all innocent.
Brownies. Pretty straightforward, one might think. I had some lovely raspberries and had seen a recipe for raspberry brownies on a BBC website.
That, says my cousin Kathryn, was my first mistake. To me, the BBC is a pillar of wisdom. But, as she wisely pointed out, they are British, and the British know nothing about brownies. Clearly.
The Recipe: Raspberry Brownies
Strongly disrecommended, but here it is anyway.
Thoughts/Tips/Mistakes
My first misgivings came when the recipe said to put in 9 oz of butter - that's two and a bit sticks! And then you're also using chocolate, not cocoa powder, so there's all the fat in the chocolate too. But I'm obedient. And it looked OK - pretty, even:
It took a while to bake, and when it came out seemed... sweaty. Maybe it's the silicone, I thought. Lots of people don't like silicone. And the recipe did say that it'd be fragile and should be allowed to cool.
So we waited. Finally, the big moment. They were greasy to the point of slimyness. And the raspberries, which had seemed like such a wonderful idea, were actually a little distressing - they're hairy, of course, and encountering a hairy pink thing in the middle of your brownie, I dunno, maybe it's just me, but there was something a bit horrifying about that.
I had made weird brownies. More than that (it hurts to say it) I had made repulsive brownies. An achievement, I suppose, just not the kind you hope for.
But it's a testament to the awesome power of chocolate that we couldn't throw them away. They were incredibly rich and almost tasted good, in a "call the ambulance right now" fashion. They sit in the freezer, and occasionally when we're feeling incredibly sluttish we bring one out and eat it with reddi-whip.
