Turtle Brownies

I've had the Martha book for over a year now so you'd think that I would know better than to not heed her advice. Always, always, always listen to Martha!

Assembling the brownie batter was not that difficult. Pretty standard stuff, actually. I was frustrated that HEB did not have ANY Ghirardelli baking chocolate in stock but the Hershey's worked out fine. I think next time I might try melting the chocolate and butter in the microwave rather than the double boiler because I'm rather clumsy and one day, I will seriously burn my hand. As Alton Brown would say, "Not good eats". That, and I have a hard time scraping all of the chocolate out of the bowl I use for the double boil. I want to use every single drop or at least as much as I can. Grandma would not be impressed by my bowl scraping abilities. The brownies baked up nicely and I had no trouble toasting and chopping the pecans myself. The major challenge with this recipe would be the caramel topping.

I have worked with sugar before, but not to the point of peanut brittle or other hard candy. I've made a few batches of my non-baking-inclined grandmother's peanut butter fudge and can confidently say that I've mastered that recipe with one minor modification - taking Alton's advice by adding a bit of corn syrup to avoid the recrystallization of the sugar. And not stirring it after it starts to boil. The result is consistently smooth and creamy. I guess I was a little too confident going into the caramel stage of this recipe. One tiny step overlooked nearly ruined the whole thing. Once the sugar started to boil, she said to stop stirring and to brush the sides down with a damp pastry brush. I'll admit that my kitchen is too tiny to have every single recommended gadget, so I don't own one - yet. After the disaster that ensured, maybe it's time to invest.

Sure enough, crystals started to form on the side of the pan. And they just kept getting bigger and bigger, like I was trying to make rock candy or something. I tried scraping them off with a clean spoon but that didn't really help. Now, I realize that I could have stopped what I was doing and started over. That's what a responsible baker would have done. I had plenty of sugar and enough time. But I didn't want to pour molten sugar down my drain and start from scratch. So I made it work* and added the cream and pecans once the color was right. I'm still not sure if it was truly light amber - it's so hard to tell. I cut the brownies once the topping was cool and could tell that the texture was not quite right, but it tasted OK.

In the end, the brownies were still a hit, even with the disclaimer that the topping would be a little grainy rather than smooth. I'll give this recipe another go and see if I get better results.

Next time, on OSC: baking with Grandma! For real this time.

* Thanks for the inspiration, Tim Gunn! When does Project Runway come back?!