David's Mole Brownies

Disclaimer: No moles or other small cute fuzzy creatures of any description were harmed in the making of this recipe. The title is pronounced "Day-vids Moh-lay Brow-nees".

This recipe is about one part "Mexican Mole Muffins" from the Green and Blacks cookbook, one part my family's traditional brownie recipe and one part pure Davidry.

What I used:

1.5 cups of flour
1 cup cocoa powder
1.5 cups soft brown sugar
1 cup boiling water
3 eggs
pinch of salt
150g 'Pure' brand sunflower based margarine
50g green and blacks dark chocolate
1tbsp powdered ginger
1tsp powdered cinnamon
1/4 tsp powdered chilli
2 fresh chillis
1 tbsp vanilla extract

What I did:

I covered the green and blacks chocolate with the boiling water to melt it and put the margarine in a pot on the stove to do similar. While the magic of thermal energy was doing its thing I sifted all the dry ingredients into the mixer bowl. Really I shouldn't have bothered doing this with the sugar - getting brown sugar through a sieve turns out to be a real pain. Then I added the wet ingredients and turned on the mixer. While this was mixing I chopped up the chillis and removed most of the seeds, then added them to the mix.

Then I greased a baking tray and used a spatula to transfer the mix from the bowl to the tray. Here I encountered my first problem: The resulting brownies were going to be wafer thin. Take 2: I transferred it to a smallish ceramic dish instead. Now it was too thick. At this point I decided "fuck it" and stuck it in the aga anyway (using a cookie tray to keep the temperature right) and baked it for about 45 minutes, turning it occasionally. I adopted the standard brownie method of considering it cooked when a knife comes out clean.

Conclusion:

Hrrm. I'll give this one a definite 'maybe'. It was reasonably nice, but all things considered I'd rather have had the normal brownies. Given some work it will probably be quite nice:

First problem, it was way too dense. I think what it needs to fix this is one more egg, less flour and no water. It may also help to cut the brown sugar with white, or replace it entirely.

Second problem, you could barely taste the spices. It needed a lot more chilli for a start: maybe one more fresh chilli and include more of the seeds, or just up the amount of dried chilli in it. You also couldn't really taste the cinnamon or ginger. I was loathe to use too much cinnamon because it can overpower recipes if you do, but it really needed a lot more than that. I think one can probably safely pile in the ginger on this.

I'll give it another try some time with fiddling, but as the recipe stands it's not really worth making again.