How To Make Brownies 3 Ways (Sundae, Cookie, Cake) | Dessert Person

you know the memes it's like the person looking like this and then like all the like square root symbols above their head that's like what i think about when i think of like one day it's gonna be like me in a dark room with like scribbles on a wall plotting like the dessert galaxy on like all these matrices of like on a spectrum of like more eggs and less eggs like more sugar less sugar more flour less flour and like plotting all the different things you can make on this 3d thing let's say it's more like charlie day in what talk oh i don't know that is hey everyone i'm claire saffits we are in my kitchen in my cabin in the hudson valley and today i am mixing it up and taking a recipe from a dessert person and showing you how to spin it three different ways so i'm using my forever brownie recipe and converting it into three unique separate treats very different from brownies it's just a really fun way to show how versatile one base recipe can be [Music] the three spins on sort of any kind of basic brownie recipe one is a skillet brownie sundae and this is not just baking brownie batter in a skillet it is really i think a cool way to take a recipe because i'm making the entire thing in the skillet it's not like make the brownie recipe pour it in a skillet bake it i'm actually just using the skillet itself to assemble the batter oh archie sorry cat playing with the toy in the background so spin number one is a skillet brownie sundae i'm gonna do kind of a grasshopper version show you how to flavor it with some peppermint extract and some chocolate mints number two is brownie cookies so we're going to add a little extra flour i'll show you how to sort of adapt a brownie recipe into brownie cookies for like a chewy kind of fudgy chocolate cookie number three is basically chocolate brownie cake so working in some egg whites i have a couple batches of my forever brownie batter already made and that's what i'm going to use to show you show you versions two and three so cookies and cake but because the skillet brownie actually gets assembled completely in the skillet i have all my ingredients here and i'm going to show you start to finish how we're going to build variation number one so number one is our grasshopper skillet brownie sundae i have a medium skillet right here 10 inches then i have all the ingredients for my forever brownies but with a couple of small tweaks so the malted forever brownie has malted milk powder i'm omitting that here and i'm adding to it a little bit of peppermint extract and rather than the milk chocolate that's chopped up and added to the batter that's called from the recipe i have the same weight of chocolate mints so these are like andes mints which just like remind me of all grandmas everywhere i love these they're like super sweet but the brownie itself isn't too sweet and they're just creamy and delicious and we're gonna make the entire thing in the skillet so it goes from like stove top to oven very very fast i have just a quarter cup of water all-purpose flour six tablespoons unsalted butter quarter cup of neutral oil kosher salt peppermint extract five ounces of semi or bittersweet chocolate two egg yolks plus one whole egg a half cup each brown sugar and white sugar quarter cup of cocoa powder unsweetened and six ounces of chopped chocolate mints so check out our brownie episode that gives you sort of a detailed step-by-step of the whole recipe so i'm just going to run through it again quickly starting by blooming the cocoa i'm going to heat a quarter cup of water directly in the skillet and whisk in my cocoa powder go ahead and add the cocoa and this step called blooming the cocoa just brings out the flavor so i added the cocoa once i saw the water steaming so i knew it was hot and now the heat is all the way down because we're going to move on to melting the chocolate and the butter and you just don't want to scorch the chocolate and let it get too hot turn the heat down to the lowest because now you're going to add the chocolate and butter and you don't want to scorch the chocolate because it can burn easily so we're doing this all very gently and then just whisk that together until smooth so once you have everything melted and in fact right when you see there's just a couple pieces of chocolate and butter that are unmelted turn off the heat entirely and then the residual heat will finish melting everything and when you have a smooth mixture you can add your sugars and your egg okay okay so once you have your sugar incorporated you can add the egg and this is why you don't want the skill too hot because you if it is very hot you could cook the egg so go ahead and whisk this really thoroughly to incorporate all the egg oh i forgot the oil oh my god i promise i've made brownies before i forgot how the oil with the butter i'm gonna add it now i'm losing it a little today archie i needed my emotional support cat we don't really need the heat of the stove anymore so i can bring it over here again i was supposed to add that oil when i added the butter and the chocolate but i forgot even though i made these twice yesterday it slipped my mind so now i'm going to switch to my spatula so now i'm going to add a little bit of peppermint extract this stuff to me is pretty potent so i would just add a quarter teaspoon and then a little bit of salt this is a teaspoon or is it two a teaspoon or two and then three quarters of a cup of all-purpose flour so once you have your flour well incorporated the last step is just to fold in the chocolate mints basically besides your measuring cups and any vessels that you use to hold the ingredients it's just there's one dish and it's the skillet and it's also your serving dish so it is a really nice fast kind of fun easy spin on any kind of brownie recipe and now fold this in this i don't want melted i want to leave they'll melt in the oven but i want to leave i want like distinct pockets of the chocolate mints and this let's see the bottom of the skillen skillet is like it's lukewarm just a little bit warm not hot i've been preheated at 350. i'm just going to clean up the rim of the skillet a little bit because i don't want any batter to burn because it's in such a thin layer right yeah exactly you want to serve a nice neat looking grasshopper skillet brownie sundae keep calling it something different to figure out the official name just for the sake of our beautiful finished shot i'm going to give it a little wipe i don't add any leavener to my brownies because i don't want a cakey brownie so there's no baking powder or soda but because it has eggs in it there will be like a puffing kind of souffle action okay so if you wanted to you could like put a little flaky salt on top that would be great these are going to go into the oven and bake for i would guess like 25 to 30. but we'll test it and pull it out and then in the meantime i'm going to move on to my second and third variations on any favorite brownie recipe in this case my forever brownies from dessert person oh yeah make sure your skill's unsafe [Music] so the second variation is brownie cookies and let me just say that i haven't actually made this and i didn't have time to test it so we're gonna see in real time if this turns out but there's no reason why it shouldn't work as far as i can tell so i have here a pre-made batch of forever brownies from dessert person made exactly according to the recipe and to this i'm going to add additional flour i have an extra quarter cup here and a teaspoon of baking soda this has the milk chocolate chopped up and folded in and just by adding a little flour and a little baking soda we're going to get a dough that holds its shape so i can form it into cookies and the baking soda will encourage it to spread in theory i'm going to just stir initially the baking soda soda not powder into the flour and then stir the flour through now obviously if you're doing this with the brownie recipe of your choice not the one from dessert person the amount of flour could be variable but basically i just want to add enough flour so that i can make a stiff enough mixture to scoop into balls like cookie dough i have a stiff enough batter that i can make from mounds of this onto my baking sheet so i have two spoons right here i'm gonna use i don't have a scoop at this location so i'm just gonna use two spoons to scoop the batter into maybe like one to two tablespoon size mounds so i just had like memories of watching my mom do cookies this way so you scoop with one spoon and then just kind of slide it off with the other no idea how much these are gonna spread but i think i could probably i don't know why i think this but i can think i can get three across [Music] we'll see it might do that thing where it all bakes into one enormous like brownie blob when i'm recipe testing i'm constantly like making judgment calls that i think i'm gonna regret and then i usually do but i just can't help myself so it's like i'm usually spacing cookies too close together or like not waiting for something to cool or not lining a pan or whatever we're gonna try this at 350. see what happens 350 is always a good starting point and then depending on how they come out you can adjust so if they spread too much at 350 i'll drop the temp and go 325 and try again or if they don't spread enough i can increase the temp also with brownie cookies as with brownies you don't want to over bake you still want the center to be kind of soft and a little chewy so i'll keep a close eye on these when they go in the oven my guess is they'll take a 350 around 10 to 12 minutes and i'll give the pan a little 180 turn action okay i just checked on the brownie that's in the oven in a skillet and that's done i'm going to pull it out and put in our cookies and i'll check it after eight minutes just to make sure i'm not over baking and i want to show you what the skillet brownie looks like because it is nice and like crackled and shiny on the surface so here you can see it got nice and puffed around the edge and then i just love when the surface gets this kind of like just crackled shiny glossy thin little layer on top so this looks so good and i'm going to set it aside to cool and then we'll serve it when it's still slightly warm with a little ice cream on top and then this is a fun dessert because it's like put it in the middle of the table people just spoon out their portion of brownie and can add a little extra ice cream and that so um cookies are going in now and then while these are baking i will show you version number three after eight minutes i rotated the baking sheet 180 and i was happy to see that they formed what looked like nicely shaped cookies and it's been about three more minutes and i just checked them and i think they're done so time to take the cookies out and then move on to variation three our chocolate brownie cake cookies are coming out they can sit right next to our skillet brownie and i think they look great so they're still super soft but the edge is kind of just firm enough that i can tap it and i'm not going to mush it and so these are going to cool completely on the baking sheet in general like with additional flour a brownie recipe is similar to a cookie recipe it is like you know people consider it brownies a bar it's like a bar cookie it's in the cookie family it's not so far off so just with a couple tweaks like a little more flour a little bit of baking soda for spread you can get to a cookie quickly from brownie batter variation three is taking brownie batter and making it into a chocolate cake almost like a chocolate tort again i haven't tested this yet i think it should work so what i have here is a batch of brownie batter but with a couple of small tweaks so from the brownie recipe and dessert person i added only yolks so the recipe called for two yolks plus a whole egg i did three yolks and then i took the whites from the three yolks and saved them so this is all yolk and then i have three egg whites right here i also pulled out a quarter cup of granulated sugar from the recipe so instead of a half cup of sugar i did a quarter cup and i reserved it right here because i'm going to beat the egg whites fold them into the brownie batter and that's going to give the cake its leavening and make this kind of light chocolate cake not flourless chocolate cake because it has flour in it but something that's going to be rich but not dense like a brownie i should also say that this does not have the chopped milk chocolate at the end because i don't want my cake to have pieces of chocolate in it and you might need to add an extra egg white so you just want to be beating three egg whites with a quarter cup of sugar so these are at room temp i'm gonna add them to my stand mixer i always just add like an additional pinch of salt the recipe already has some salt in it i'm just gonna do this i always do that to help with egg whites so turn this on low this is a nine inch cake pan this is kind of a weird pan this is like something that i got from my mom who i think got it for my grandma it has a removable bottom so you can use a nine 9-inch spring form you want something with high sides and i just brushed it with a little butter and then coated the pan in some granulated sugar so that's our pan again 350 is how we're going to bake this i'm going to turn on my mixer once i start to see the egg whites frothing and turning white and opaque i'm gonna start to stream in my sugar and i just go a very very light cascade of sugar little by little into the egg whites so i have them on like medium-high [Music] well it it dissolves because the egg whites are mostly water um and there's like i don't really know what the science is there's like a deionization thing that happens i don't know something to do with ionization i don't really know it's the whole thing right now it's looking pretty like meringue if you want to see this so i have whipped these egg whites to stiff peaks and i'm going to have trouble with this last time try to remove the whisk you don't want to overbeat egg whites and in fact i maybe went slightly too far here easy to do in a stand mixer just because the egg whites will start to be a little bit dry and may be difficult to incorporate but that is a nice peak nice stiff peak [Music] so you can see three egg whites really turns into a decent amount of meringue the meringue is filled with tiny little air bubbles those air bubbles are going to incorporate into the brownie batter and expand in the oven and lighten into a cake texture the brownie batter is really thick so initially i'm adding a third of the meringue and i'm going to stir it through very thoroughly and you'll see the color will lighten it'll be like a more kind of just a lighter brown and then it'll be easier to just fold in the remaining meringue very gently so this is like more of a stir than a fold so you kind of sacrifice some of the egg whites initially they will deflate so the idea is just to loosen this up a little bit be able to fold in the rest of the meringue so once you have that first third fully incorporated add half of the remaining meringue fold that through and then the rest of the meringue same thing having not tested this i can say i think it needs more egg whites and i over beat the meringue a little bit so you're taking basically what's on the bottom moving it to the top and now you can see we have something that looks really cake battery it's really light maybe it doesn't need more egg whites we'll see so the egg whites are fully incorporated you don't want to over mix anytime you're incorporating egg whites and i'm going to just scrape this into the [Laughter] cotton just in time then smooth the surface and work it into the sides of the pan i think this is going to be really good i'm feeling good about this i'm going to pop it into the oven i'm still at 350 and i'm going to let it bake until it's risen the top is dry and kind of crackly and i'll do a cake tester into the center and it's done when it comes out clean so we'll see i'm guessing it's going to be around like 30 35 minutes but we'll see the cake has been in for 38 40 minutes around there and i can smell it it smells done and i just peeked the surface has gone just from shiny to matte and i'm pretty sure it's done but we're going to test it so you can see it doesn't look like wet and shiny anymore and it's nice and domed do this clean tester i mean there's maybe one tiny crumb on it so this is done this looks great it has risen very nicely i don't know about you but i feel very excited to know that these are all things you can make with simple brownie batter and i know they're going to be delicious because i started with the dessert person forever brownie recipe and now i'm going to just do a couple finishing touches and we'll sample all three so i'm going to do some powdered sugar over our chocolate cake and then just a little ice cream on our brownie our peppermint brownie skillet thing whatever we calling it you want to turn the up it is going to make it drop no it's okay i'll account for the airflow moving in this direction there's a little bit of like fat on the surface that might take some of the sugar but that's okay i'll just put an extra generous coating on it can we turn off that ac real quick coffee [Music] okay that looks good exciting news vanilla was on sale at the store for 2 39 so we got a couple pints i'm gonna do one generous portion of ice cream in the middle but of course this is meant to be shared so if you are setting this on a table with guests you can also just pass the pinup ice cream around and everyone can take more that's not how i imagine that with my look we're making i'm making a snowman i'm going to taste our brownie cookie i think the spread is really nice they're thin the edge is firm but the center is still soft like i can bend it so that's to me the right level of bake the right doneness i want like all the things that i love in a chewy brownie but in cookie form so i'm going to show you i also really like seeing the little raised areas where i know there's a piece of chocolate these are excellent it's really not like eating a brownie because they're lighter they have because of that baking soda in there they're a little bit airier but it has all that great texture that chewiness the little crisp edge and also like intensely chocolatey next i'm going to go with the skillet brownie so i'm gonna spoon out maybe just from the edge and i'll show you what the interior looks like and like we didn't grease anything on the bottom so it's not the kind of thing that you'd be able to unmold and then slice into wedges or anything so this is something where like everyone is going to have to take their little bit just directly from the pan so really nice almost like still slightly gooey but great kind of fudgy brownie texture you can see the little areas where i had those chocolate mints i'm going to give just the brownie part a taste mmm i just got a little piece of the chocolate mint i'm very glad i didn't put any more peppermint extract in fact it could even be a little less so if you don't want a super pepperminty flavor go with an eighth of a teaspoon rather than a quarter and do even less i feel like the peppermint needs the cold ice cream to kind of balance it out and really really good i think this would be a tremendous crowd pleaser as a dessert claire you should you should zoom in on those chickens right now what they're doing is so cute i should zoom in well you should you know with the fellowship of your crew zoom in on the chickens [Music] okay i'm removing this cake slice i can tell from cutting into it that it's oh guys it's not a brownie it definitely has more of a crumb but it to me it is that style of like very moist but still light like european style chocolate cake that you'd find in like a viennese cafe looks really nice isn't baking cool it's like you can make so many different things it smells good i know it's gonna be good well it's like very intensely flavored and very very chocolatey we have both cocoa and the melted chocolate in here but the texture is still very light and so it's a nice balance i think between something like intense but light enough that it doesn't like it's not so intense that i can't eat more of it you know that's not the kind of chala dessert that i like so it is a really elegant chocolate cake that like you would never know could have been brownies if you would just not added the egg whites so really cool trick i feel like there's so much great learning about baking in this episode because with just really small tweaks you can go from one thing to another to a third thing so it's like this was just a little more flour and some baking soda this was a different mixing method with a couple different flavor additions and this one was separating out the egg whites adding a couple whipping them with some of the sugar that i reserved and baking as a cake so this is really fun and to me makes me like reconnect with what i love about baking which is that it's like kind of a miracle and that's always exciting so i hope you enjoyed this episode this is all the ways you can use brownie batter there's a few of the ways you can use brownie batter my vote goes to the forever brownies and dessert person but use whichever one you really like and go wild go play around experiment and that's what baking's all about so thank you for watching thanks for coming to visit at the cabin and um we'll have more episodes and like and subscribe and cut [Music]

Channel: Claire Saffitz x Dessert Person

Views: 550,387

Keywords: brownies, brownie recipe, how to make brownies, fudgy brownies, best brownies, fudgy brownies recipe, chocolate brownie recipe, claire saffitz, claire saffitz dessert person, claire saffitz makes, bon appetit, dessert person, dessert, desserts, brownie cookie, brownie cookies, brownie cookie recipe, brownie cookies recipe, chocolate brownie cookies, sundae, ice cream sundae, cake, brownie cake, chocolate brownie cake, chocolate cake, how to make brownie cake, claire brownies

Id: cxDroV_k0qI

Length: 24min 6sec (1446 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021