My younger sister, Juliana, and I have been planning to get together to bake something/have a dance party for weeks now, but it kept getting put off. She finally came over this afternoon, and the results were of epically sugary proportions.
My original thought was to make meringue cookies, since I had leftover egg whites from a chocolate silk pie I made last week. But since we needed to wait for the egg whites to reach room temperature, we warmed up our cooking skills with some Whopper brownies.
I got the idea for malted milk chocolate brownies after making the aforementioned chocolate silk pie last week. It was supposed to be a chocolate
malted silk pie, but the malt powder flavor just didn't come through. I thought I'd give the malt powder another chance to prove itself, but with the aid of an entire movie theater-size box of Whoppers.
This recipe is based on the basic brownie recipe from my grandmother's copy of
Betty Crocker's Picture Cookbook
.
You'll need:
2 squares semisweet baking chocolate
1/3 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
3/4 flour
1/2 tsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
2 tbsp. malt powder
1 5-oz. box of Whoppers
Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Grease an 8-inch square pan with a little butter.
Melt the chocolate and the butter and place in a large bowl. Beat in the sugar and eggs. After it is thoroughly mixed, beat in the flour, baking powder, salt, and malt powder.
You'll need to break up the Whoppers before adding them to your brownies. We did it this way:
Which is to say, we sealed the Whoppers up in a plastic bag and then Juliana jumped on them.
You could also smash them up with a rolling pin or put them in a food processor or something, but after seeing this method, why would you want to?
Add the crushed Whoppers to the batter, reserving about 2 tbsp. Mix well.
Spread the batter into the pan and then sprinkle the reserved crushed Whoppers over the top. This makes a nice caramelized crust.
Bake for 30 to 35 minutes, or until the top of the brownies have a dull color. Cool and then cut. This recipe should make about 16 brownies.
For our next trick, we made raspberry meringue cookies, based on
this recipe by Sandra Lee.
You'll need:
1/2 cup egg whites
1 tsp. raspberry extract
1/4 tsp. cream of tartar
1 cup powdered sugar
3 drops red food coloring
Preheat oven to 225 degrees. Line two baking sheets with aluminum foil.
In a large bowl, beat together the egg whites, raspberry extract, and cream of tartar with a whisk until the mixture gets frothy. Then add powdered sugar by tablespoon. Continue whisking while adding the sugar. Add food coloring, and keep beating until the mixture forms stiff peaks (as Juliana said to the meringues, "I want you to make Madonna's tits from the '80s"). This took us about 30 minutes with our whisk. You could go a lot faster with an electric mixer.
Juliana demonstrates the type of exercises you'll need to do if you want to beat the whites by hand.
Spoon mixture into a pastry bag fitted with a medium star tip, then pipe into 2-inch spirals on the baking sheets.
Like so.
Bake in the over for about 50 minutes, rotating the pans halfway through. When they are finished baking, turn off the heat on the oven, crack open the door, and allow the meringues to dry out for about 10 minutes. Then you can just pluck them off the aluminum foil.
You'll get cookies like this:
This recipe made about 30 cookies.
They were slightly on the flat side, and more brown than pink, but they tasted airy and delicious. Plus, the shapes were pretty hilarious. Clearly we need more practice (and maybe an electric mixer), but this seemed like a reasonable first attempt.
