Adventures of an American Chef on the Run: One Bowl Fudgy Cocoa Brownies

If there's one thing I love it's brownies.  I've been looking for a reason to justify buying new cocoa, something that's generally at least 50 pesos.  Considering that is often times a third of my grocery budget, it's not been very high.  I've been known to make sinfully good weed brownies, featuring this recipe and our dabs, cooked at a specific temperature to keep from cooking out the psychoactivity essentially.  While we didn't have the spare dabs to make a whole batch tonight, I did make some brownies in pan we make dabs in, to share them here with you on Steemit. 

The only thing not pictures is coconut oil. Oh, and eggs. Forgot the eggs. The ratios are as follows:

2 eggs

1.5 c sugar

.5 c flour

7 T cocoa powder

.5 cup butter

1 t vanilla

1 T coconut oil

This pan for us is essentially just as important as my cast iron, if not more so.  I mentioned in my recent article about how glass works that Pyrex used to make their baking wear out of borosilicate, the type of glass I use.  In the last decade or so, they switched to a cheaper soda lime glass, much less resistant to heating and cooling stress.  We found this pan no joke on the floor in the kitchen of an abandoned house in Detroit.  We took it home, washed it and it became our dab pan. Later after some research we found that it is indeed classical Pyrex, much closer to lab equiptment which is much closer to what we are looking for.  We've used it ever since to make our dabs and I somewhat regularly make brownies in it both to clean out the corners and because it's the perfect size pan for them. 

I've found a little hack recently.  Oftentimes when cooking or baking I find the need to melt butter.  When I'm done, there's always a little bit of butter that seemingly went wasted before.  Now I tip whatever measuring device I use into the cup after emptying out the butter and let it drip out. Doing this on a heated pan like my griddle is nice, as most of the butter just slides off the cup.  I've got to be careful removing it however, as it's really hot when you take it off the griddle. 

This is the vessel I generally use for melting butter, still full of the butter for the recipe. 

After a few minutes, most that's going to drip out has.  Now you've got enough butter in the pan to oil it, which I just spread around with my fingers.  There is a small amount of cannabis oil in the pan, in the spots where I couldn't reach with the razorblade. This means that the corner brownies mainly had little potent cannabis infused chunks to them, which is a nice treat with the already delicious treat that is brownies. I usually add dab when I melt the butter, mixing it until it melts into the butter.

Measure out the sugar into a bowl.  

Add the butter and blend them together.

Add two eggs and the vanilla and blend until creamy and frothy. 

Something I love about Mexican culture is many products feature limited edition packaging, meant for the consumer to wash, keep and reuse.  There are often promotional deals essentially strapping jars, cookware or other useful items to the items you're already buying as a perk.  I've gotten everything from jars to cookie cutters and cake mix. Yogurt is often sold with spoons.  I saw cajeta, which is a caramel sauce, sold with free cookies taped to it today.  This find is a nice limited edition hersheys cocoa container, featuring cool flowers that I got from Walmart for 63 pesos, around 3 dollars.  It'll end up in my glass shop when it's empty. 

The cocoa came in a sealed pouch inside, something I'll transfer to a plastic baggie when I have the money to buy more. If I don't the humidity will get in and ruin it, which is what happened to my old cocoa. 

Add the cocoa to the batter, then the salt.

Add the flour at this stage too and blend just until combined. Overblending will make the batter tougher and more cakelike, not fudgy like we're looking for in a good brownie.

I got overexcited and didn't take pictures of the rest of the process before baking.  After the batter is mixed, pour it into the butter pan and spread until even.  Put in the oven at 350 if they're plain old regular brownies.  For the best cannabis brownies, I tend to use a much lower temperature, which makes the baking time much longer. I'll detail my processes for that eventually here, probably when I have enough dabs in my life to make edibles again. 

Many recipes will tell you to wait until the next day for perfect fudgy brownie squares and they're totally right.  I however do not have that sort of patience, so jagged lines and messy gooey brownies it is for me, the way it should be.

Everyone loves a good messy sloppy brownie every once in a while, you know, the type you need a spoon to eat? I've always had a soft spot for these, partially due to ease.  Add some caramel swirl and pecans and you've got deluxe gourmet fat kid brownies, something I want to make soon. I'm thinking cajeta and pecans....how about you? I've got a nice shiny new can of cocoa calling my name, watch out!