Still Life, With Cats

I know I’ve mentioned before how much I really, really like The Great British Bake Off. So you can imagine how excited I was when I discovered that there’s other versions out there – including one for Australia. Consequently, Richard and I have been making our way through the old seasons (all whopping two of them).

Tonight we were watching an episode while eating dinner (leftover curry chicken from the crockpot in case you were wondering), and one of the challenges was brownies. Mmm. Brownies, I thought. A bunch of Richard’s writer friends were supposed to be coming over for a meeting, so I figured I’d whip up a batch.

I poked around on the internet (where I normally go any time I get a yen to bake something) and found a recipe for brownies swirled with a peanut butter filling that seemed quite promising, and headed off to the kitchen to whip them up. Everything seemed to go fine during the mixing phase – nothing about the recipe sounded ‘off’ and the better certainly looked fine – but alas, it all went down hill after that.

The recipe said to bake them for 20 minutes. I checked after 20 minutes. The edges were firming up but the center was a big wobbly mess. I put them back in for another 5 minutes. And then another. And then another 10. Nope. Still wobbly. Still not cooking.

After about an hour and a half of checking them, popping them back in, and so on, I finally gave up. No brownies for the meeting. Later on Richard and I tried them. The edges were baked, and had that perfect crackle top you want from a brownie, atop a nice chewy middle, but roughly two inches from the edge, it all just went wrong. There’s moist, chewy brownies, and then there’s just raw dough, and these teetered far too close to the latter for me. Raw cookie dough can be tasty, but raw brownie batter – no. Just, no.

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