Three weeks ago today, I made gluten-free, vegan brownies for my nephews, who are now back at their respective colleges for their junior year and who turned 20 that day. The weekend before, I had tried adapting a traditional (containing butter, eggs, and all-purpose flour) Fudgy Brownies recipe from Martha Stewart Living because I had decided I wanted to send brownies to the guys this time (instead of the usual chocolate chip cookies) and I wanted to make it safe for Tony. And I'm glad I did that trial run, because those brownies didn't turn out that well at all.
The recipe, which I clipped from the September 2015 issue, was paired with a Cakey Brownie recipe. In the magazine, it was set up as the answer to a reader about how to turn his recipe for a cake-like brownie into a fudgier brownie. Online the question is gone, and there's a Kitchen Conundrums video featuring Thomas Joseph, who—along with his producers, Samantha Schutz and Greta Anthony—won a James Beard Media Award last year for Best Video Webcast.
A note to the web people at marthastewart.com: You might want to make it easier to locate these prestigious-award-winning KC videos. Unless you know to search for them by name, your best chance of finding one is to just stumble across it because it happens to be on a topic you're researching; there's no separate page for videos in general or these ones in particular. (The Mad Genius videos of Justin Chapple, who plays a similar, though apparently bigger, role at Food & Wine than Joseph does in Martha's company and who's a James Beard nominee in his own right, are very easy to find at foodandwine.com.)
Back to me and my brownies: I took a chance on not using xanthan gum, because they contained a good deal of cocoa and cocoa can act as a binder like gluteny flour (or xanthan gum) if there's enough of it in the recipe. There apparently wasn't enough. And my three vegan eggs didn't help much. The brownies were flat and chewy and not that reminiscent of fudge. Or brownies.
The next weekend, I opted for tweaking the Cakey Brownies recipe. I again used three vegan eggs (and I'm glad I did because Mike asked me in a text message whether the resulting, successful brownies were vegan because a friend of his who wanted to try them is vegan) and added 3/8 teaspoon of xanthan gum. Advice on how much xanthan gum to use per cup of gluten-free flour varies widely on the Internet and, of course, depends on what you're baking. Cinnamon rolls, for instance, need a good deal more than snickerdoodles. But the websites of King Arthur Flour and Bob's Red Mill were in agreement that 1/4 teaspoon per cup works for cookies, so that's what I went with.
I also added 1/2 teaspoon of vanilla to the recipe because vanilla is good at bringing out the flavor of chocolate. And I used coconut oil in place of unsalted butter. I placed the jar in the refrigerator hours before I started making the brownies and then microwaved it briefly so the coconut oil would be soft enough to easily measure but still decidedly solid.
All of the measurements above are for a single batch. I doubled everything to make two pans.
Here are the final products, which were ultimately more fudgy than cakey:
And here I am packaging them for the 'phews, with a few bits left over for me and Tony, who took the pic:
Next time I make these brownies, I will bake them for at least 35 minutes, and probably for 40, to see if I can get them in that sweet spot where they're more like a bar cookie but not overly cake-like. The timing was difficult to determine because of the substituted ingredients and because I have 9-inch square pans rather than the 8-inch square pans called for.
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I've been hesitant to write this item in a way because I fear looking like more of a killjoy than I normally do on this blog, because I'm pointing out errors in logic in one of my favorite songs from a musical. But I'm going to do this writeup because it gives me a chance to show off my critical-thinking skills. And my usual disclaimer remains in effect: I don't claim to be perfect, and I'm pointing out these errors in a spirit of helpful criticism, not know-it-all-ness.
One of my favorite Broadway shows I saw when I was living in New York was [title of show], and, pre-Tony, I had a crush on Hunter Bell, the show's co-star and Tony Award–nominated book writer.
Bell and Susan Blackwell, who also co-starred in [tos], wrote the book for Now. Here. This., an Off-Broadway show Tony, some friends, and I saw in April 2012. (That's a link to my private blog, Hawleyblog. Let me know if you want the log-in and password info.) The music and lyrics for both shows were written by co-star Jeff Bowen, who didn't really have a big number to call his own in [tos]. In N.H.T., he stepped into the spotlight with "Dazzle Camouflage," an amazing song about his attempts to hide his gayness when he was younger by playing the class clown or straight boy, among other disguises. Listen to it here.
I've played that song a lot over the years, and I've noticed two inconsistencies in the lyrics, one that's pretty big to me and I caught pretty quickly and another one that's more subtle and may be easily explained away.
The costume for Bowen's Ed Grimley character, whom Bowen is portraying at the Suncoast Middle School's annual PTA pancake supper, is first described as "perfect: a collared shirt buttoned to the top and high-waisted pant with just a hint of moose knuckle." Later, after his performance, he says, "We get home, I peel off my sweaty, makeshift costume, take a shower, go into my room, and lock the door." The costume is either perfect or thrown together in a good-enough-to-get-by manner; it can't be both.
We also have Bell, as a fellow student, telling Bowen early in the song "You made Shane Fessler laugh so hard Gatorade came out his nose." Later, after Bowen hatches his plan to dazzle everyone with his multiple personalities so they won't question his sexuality, he says, "Then, maybe I would hear Shane Fessler say 'Dude, you're funny' instead of 'Dude, you're a faggot.'" That seems contradictory, though it's possible Shane Fessler would laugh at Bowen's shenanigans but wouldn't acknowledge he found him to be so funny.
Anyhow, please enjoy that song; "Archer," my other favorite song from N.H.T.; and "Nine People's Favorite Thing" and "I Am Playing Me" (featuring Heidi Blickenstaff, the fourth member of the cast for both shows and the best singer among them) from [tos].
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I liked Tales of the City an awful lot (see my previous post), but it got too soap opera–ish at the end for me. At some point, I'll read the next book in the series, More Tales of the City, but my local library doesn't have it, so I'll need to get it through other means.
And speaking of which, I finally gave up on borrowing the Bill Hawley mysteries through an interlibrary loan (see my previous post again; the second attempt was no more successful than the first), so I asked for them for my birthday, which is coming up this Thursday. My sister, Tracey, bought them for me, and the last two arrived in the mail yesterday:
I'll start on Final Viewing after I finish Christopher Isherwood's The World in the Evening, which I'm about two-thirds through. I know it's not fair to judge a book by how it differs from your expectations of it, but I was disappointed it took such a very long time, more than 100 pages, before the protagonist, Stephen Monk, even acknowledged he'd previously had a same-sex attraction. I mean, Isherwood doesn't seem to have had a heterosexual moment in his entire life, which began in 1904 and ended in 1986.
Anyway, there's been a lot of flashing back to Monk's life with his deceased first wife, and the dialogue between them is filled with overly polite protestations and refusals to tell each other what they're truly thinking. I'm finding it all pretty dull. I think it was the wrong Isherwood book to start exploring his body of work with.
Much of this book has been set at a home on Boundary Lane in fictional Dolgelly, Pennsylvania, while Tales of the City revolved around the tenants in a home on the similar-sounding, fictional Barbary Lane, which was inspired by Macondray Lane in real-life San Francisco.