A Martha Pumpkin Swirl

So I've never really been a follower of Martha Stuart, but after my little adventure I might have to reconsider my feelings towards her.  I love pumpkin, I love chocolate, and I love recipes that require more than two bowls.  Not that I love washing them, but I derive a certain pleasure from the process of baking and if there's something that will prolong that process and improve the taste, I'm in favor of trying it.  So when I found a Martha Stuart Pumpkin Chocolate Brownie Swirl recipe, I figured I'd give it a go.

The list of ingredients is not quite daunting, though it is a bit longer than most brownie recipes.  After having made it, I'd probably make a few changes to the recipe.  I found it on the Smitten Kitchen blog (here's the direct link) but the following is my own slightly altered version.  I'm including alterations I'd make if I were to do it again.  If you try it and it doesn't work, feel free to blame it on me.  There are plenty of other things to blame failure on though, so I encourage you to try the blame on them first, but I guess I'm a good third or fourth scapegoat.  

Anyway, here's the ingredient list if you're making it in a 9x13 inch baking pan.  Also, I would say this is more of a cake than a brownie, despite what Martha and Smitten seem to think.  We clearly have differing opinions of what constitutes a brownie.  

Ingredients:

1 cup butter or margarine (for those of you afraid of cholesterol or dairy)

12 oz (1 regular size bag) semisweet chocolate chips

3 1/4 cup flour

2 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp cayenne pepper

1/2 tsp salt

2 1/4 cup sugar

6 eggs plus 2 egg whites (or 8 eggs if you can stomach cracking that many eggs into one dessert)

2 Tb vanilla extract

2 1/2 cups pumpkin puree (about 1 1/2 cans)

1/2 cup vegetable oil

2 tsp cinnamon

1 tsp ground nutmeg

1 cup chocolate chips (extra for mixing in, not to be confused with what you're melting)

1/2 cup chopped pecans

First preheat the oven to 350 degrees.  I forgot to do this until halfway through which was fine, because this recipe takes a while to make and our oven heats up fast.  But all recipes start with preheating the oven, so there's no real reason to do this one any differently.

Next mix together in a bowl the eggs, vanilla extract and sugar beating until you get a pretty foamy layer on top.  Five minutes with electric beaters, or three if you're impatient like myself.  It should look something like this:

Now go get a pan (don't try it in the microwave, you are likely to burn the chocolate, trust me I've done it enough times) and melt the butter and chocolate over the stove until smooth.  It should look something like Willy Wonka's chocolate river.  Or the picture below:

Now mix the flour, baking powder, cayenne pepper, and salt together in a bowl.  I hate doing this and usually just add all the dry ingredients into the wet at once.  But you're going to need the second bowl later anyway, so with this recipe you might as well.

Good, now you're going to beat the flour mixture into the egg mixture in batches until it's all nicely combined like this:

Doesn't that just make you want to start baking this recipe immediately?  It just looks so darn tasty.  God, I'm starting to want to make it all over again just posting these pictures.  But I guess I should finish my post first.

So now you're going to split this batter between your two bowls (see, I wasn't lying when I said you'd need it anyway).  I didn't read the whole recipe before I started to make it and at this point realized I should have just mixed the dry ingredients together in the second bowl to begin with.  Ah well, live and learn.

Now that you've split the batter, you're going to pour the chocolate mixture into one of the bowls and beat it in with the batter.  You will likely begin to drool at this point, so I suggest wearing a face mask.  Learning to shut your mouth when cooking might also work, but I have yet to master that technique.  Now try not to drool on your laptop, but this is what it should look like:

Great, so now you're going to add the pumpkin, oil, cinnamon, and nutmeg to the other bowl of batter and beat it all together.  Side by side it looks like these lovely ladies:

Now I think things could always use chocolate chips, so I would recommend adding a cup of chocolate chips to the chocolate bowl.  You could really put them in either, but the chocolate chips might dim the orange/brown contrast of batters if there's already brown in the orange batter.  I think I might have made that sentence unnecessarily complicated.  I'm going to assume you're smart enough to piece out my meaning.

Now you're going to grease a 9x13 pan and pour half the chocolate batter into the bottom of the pan.  Top it with half the pumpkin batter.  It looks like this:

Spread it evenly across the chocolate bottom, and then put down another chocolate layer and a final pumpkin layer.  Using a knife, swirl it around until you get the marbling effect you wanted:

Sprinkle the pecans on top and bake for about an hour, but check on it at 45 minutes in case your oven is much faster than mine.  When it's done it will look like this:

And it will taste like this:

YUM!!!

Actually, I thought it was just ok but everyone else seemed to love it and it was gone by the end of Saturday afternoon so I guess something went right.  Perhaps it's because I have a different expectation of brownies.  I want them to be moist and not at all spongy, so this was a bit too cake-like for me.  But With my suggested alterations (more sugar, less flour, added chocolate chips) I think it will be a bit more brownie-esque.  But really, I like pleasing others with my food just as much as I like pleasing myself, so in that regard it really was a success.  

In other exciting news, my sister just bought me a new copy of my favorite dessert cookbook (I long ago wore my last copy to pieces) so when I return to DC I will attempt to bake everything from the book I haven't tried before.  There isn't much, but I'm giving it all a shot.  That means you have some donuts and several candies coming at you in the next few weeks.  Get excited!  I certainly am.

An Acceptable Amount of Pumpkin Bread

There are many reasons for this post.  Firstly, a friend gave me some home cooked pumpkin puree, so I had fresh ingredients waiting in my fridge with a real expiration date.  Secondly, this week marks the beginning of the end of the Harry Potter Saga, and I promised my date for the movie that we would have appropriate snack food on hand.  Pumpkin felt witch and wizard food.  Thirdly, I am having a Friday night dessert at my house and needed to make something for it.  Currently I am the only confirmed guest, but I have some cute neighbors so if no one else shows up I'll just bring my bread over and use it to earn a place for me on their couch.  Lastly and most importantly, all pumpkin bread recipes make an obscene amount of bread.  Who needs three loaves of pumpkin bread?  OK, let me rephrase that.  Who has the metabolism that allows for the caloric intake that would inevitably follow the baking of three pumpkin breads?  Not me, that's for sure.

So with all that in mind I went on a hunt for a recipe, made some alterations, and got baking.

Now let me preface this by explaining that a lot of my best equipment is back at home in the kitchen where I learned to cook.  I am rather poor right now what with working for a non-profit and all, so I haven't invested in a flour sifter yet.  Also, being at the lower end of the income scale has quickly made it apparent how expensive unnecessary baking can be.  Organic eggs (the only kind I'm willing to buy, I'm a hippie at heart and I'm not afraid to admit it), pounds of sugar, butter, and chocolate are all expensive.  So I really haven't been baking nearly as much as I have in the past.  Which is just my way of excusing my stupid mistakes which we'll see in just a moment.

Ingredients:
1 1/2 cups white sugar
1 cup canned or fresh pumpkin puree
1/2 cup vegetable oil
2 eggs
1/3 cup water
1 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/4 cups flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp ginger
handful of chopped pecans
1 cup chocolate chips

Directions:
Start by setting the oven to 350 degrees.  Now the basic easy directions are this: mix together wet ingredients plus sugar.  Add in sifted flour and baking soda, then pecans and chocolate chips, put it in a pan and bake it for about an hour and a half.

This seems simple enough.  But if you know me, and I'm pretty sure I don't have any followers who don't know me personally, you know I have a habit of making mistakes rather easily.  So I started by mixing the sugar and wet ingredients together.  They looked kind of soupy, but that's to be expected.

Then I added in all the rest of the ingredients at once.

This is where it gets complicated.  The reason recipes tell you to mix the dry ingredients together first, and then add in the nuts and chocolate chips, is perhaps because it's much harder to break up clumps of flour when there is a (comparatively) giant pecan bit in the way.  This wouldn't have been an issue at all had I sifted the flour first with a handy (and fun) sifter.  They're really only a few dollars and using it makes you feel professional not to mention it's just fun.  You just turn a crank on the side of a sifter that looks like this:

and it pushes the de-clumped flour right through.  It's awesome.  I did not buy one, did not use one, and ended up with some major clumping.  This means someone will bite into my bread, look at a white spot, and ask if I put white chocolate in the recipe.  Then they'll realize it's flour and leave the rest of the uneaten bread on their plate.  Another reason I hate pre-sifting the flour and baking soda is that it just gives me another bowl to rinse, which I hate.  So this might have failed.  But regardless, this is how it looked after I took it out of the oven:

It did make the whole apartment smell delicious though.  So there's always that positive side of things.
But back to the negative, if you really want to make the bread work right you should dust the chocolate chips in 1 Tb of flour before adding them to the batter or they'll just sink right to the bottom of the mixture and you'll have a layer of chocolate chips on the bottom of the pan.  This is what happened with my bread because I was lazy and threw it all in at once.  And the moral of the story is: don't bake when you're feeling lazy or it won't come out the way you'd like it to. On the bright side, the bread does taste pretty wonderful.

If I get enough people to come Friday night, I'll also make an apple/pecan cake or a chocolate pie, but I'm not counting on it so those recipes may have to wait.

Until then, sift out, eat up, and pumpkin over to a rather tasty bread.