Fiddlehead Kitchen

All ideas aren't necessarily good ones. Well, in this case that's not entirely true. I do think a rich, chocolatey brownie spiked with some chili heat is a good idea, just not this rendition. Alas, it was my bright idea when I came across the Guajillo Chili chocolate you see here (love the packaging, cute!). I had used the plain version of this brand and type of chocolate once before in class on a day that we made a particularly terrible mole. True story, it was not good, and no amount of tweaking we did improved it. There was a flaw in the recipe somewhere. That's the point of testing in recipe development. Very rarely are you going to knock it out of the park on the first version. So it went with this Guajillo Chili chocolate brownie fail.

Let's start with the chocolate tasting. This is some seriously sugar-grainy chocolate that reminded me of Freddo Frog chocolate my sister brought back from Australia. We'll just say that was a long time ago, and perhaps Freddo has changed. I do remember Freddo, in all his cute molded chocolate frogginess, being both sweeter and grainier in texture than say, a Hershey bar. The heat in the Chocolate Mexicano Guajillo Chili is decent if you eat a piece of it, it just didn't seem to survive once it was melted along with unsalted butter. I tasted the batter and noticed the lack of heat, and added some cayenne pepper, but not enough I would later discover.

Decreasing the amount of sugar in my "regular" brownie recipe was a must to account for the additional sugar in the chocolate. I should have also ditched one of the 3 eggs I normally use because the texture was just odd—not moist and chewy, but rather dense though not heavy. I know, how contradictory does that sound?! It was kind of like a souffle-meets-molten chocolate cake if both are slightly over-baked, you follow me? Just trust me, it was not the texture anyone is looking for in a brownie, except maybe someone who likes a cakeier brownie... you know, crazy people.

In the end, the chocolate taste was good, but the overall color was quite a bit lighter than my usual brownie. I'm still a little amazed that the chili, even the cayenne, didn't come through at all. By the way, that's a little Maldon Salt on top of the brownies, in case you were wondering. Back to (almost) square one I go. It's a challenge now to nail this chili-heat spiked brownie, but that's kind of the fun part, and I'll be approaching it from a bit of a different angle next time. Stay tuned.