This month is very busy. Sorry to say, but I am still sick. I have this annoying cough, the last parting gift that my cold left me. It surprises me of how quickly my motivation to do anything took a nosedive as soon as I became sick. I am a weakling. Thus, this is me catching up on some posts.

Last week, I made Claire Saffitz’s Malted “Forever” brownies; the recipe is straight from her book, Dessert Person. I wanted to see how it would stack up with my go-to brownie recipe, which is Stella Parks’ Glossy Fudge Brownies (recipe here). I love Stella Parks’ brownies, which are not too sweet, not too fussy to make, and delivers consistently fudgy results. I wanted to compare it to Claire’s brownie recipe, which made the bold claim that these were “forever brownies” because they were the only brownie recipe that I would need. Would I find that to be true and replace Stella’s brownies?

Spoiler alert: nah. Putting this here so future me won’t have to waste more time reading the rest of this post to find out the answer.

Anyway, the first thing I noticed about this recipe is that you have to temper the chocolate. Nothing wrong with tempering, it’s just a little finicky. I forgot that things like tempering chocolate need to be babysat, which is how my first batch of melting/tempering chocolate ends up seizing and clumping into one grainy mess. This required a little bit more finesse than Stella’s brownie recipe, which called for me to directly add chocolate into the saucepan.

The mixture wasn’t as smooth as I wanted it to be, as there were some grainy-ness to the melted chocolate but I didn’t want to mess with it after the first attempt of tempering chocolate.

I then combined the rest of the dry ingredients. I used regular milk powder, since I didn’t have any malted milk powder (did you know that malted milk powder is also ovaltine powder? didn’t know that.). I then thought that this brownie recipe was ready to go until I saw “add the milk chocolate to the batter”.

What chocolate?

That’s when I realize that Claire adds chocolate chunks to her brownies. Sticking with the spirit of haphazardly following instructions, I chopped up some Cadbury’s milk chocolate that I found in the snack shelf and folded it into the batter. I have no idea if I can use Cadbury’s chocolate for baking but I was about to find out.

After pouring the batter into the 8×8″ baking pan, all that was left for me to do was to bake and wait.

The results, to say the least, uh, were interesting. For one, I didn’t the satisfying glossy sheen that’s usually on top of brownies. It looked more like a cake. It didn’t look too great. It tasted like a normal brownie, albeit sweeter than I would like. No minds were blown that night. I followed Claire’s suggestion to let the brownies cool overnight to let the flavor settle and develop more. So I popped it into the fridge overnight.

The next day, the brownies firmed up. Unfortunately, so did the chocolate. Biting into the brownie meant biting into a hard piece of milk chocolate. I did not enjoy the texture contrast and ended up microwaving my brownie to remelt the milk chocolate chunks.

Overall, you know, I probably/likely did something wrong along the way. I’m pretty sure this is not the way that Claire’s brownies are supposed to be like but, in the end, I’ll just stick with Stella’s brownies. I like their look and appearance and at least, with Stella, I don’t have to deal with chocolate chunks and doing something semi-fussy like tempering chocolate.

Maybe I’ll try this recipe again but overall, wasn’t that satisfied with the result of this.