TWD: Chipster-Topped Brownies

This week’s Tuesdays with Dorie recipe was Chipster-Topped Brownies. I think this recipe ties with the Sweet Melissa Sundays brown-out cake, which was a chocolate cake covered with brownie crumble, for most ridiculously decadent combination dessert. If you haven’t depleted your chocolate and butter supply and are in the mood for another fudgy treat, the recipe can be found here on Elyse's Confectionery Creations. Chipster-Topped Brownies are type of concoction that I would normally make a quarter or a third of a recipe just to try it out, but Mr. Penpen was going to see his friends on Saturday night and I figured these would be a terrific follow-up to the cheese steaks they were having for dinner.

After reading the Problems and Questions section on the TWD site, I was a little nervous about how these would turn out; there seemed to be some problems with the cookie dough sinking and/or baking quicker than the brownie layer. The top looked done after about forty-five minutes, but the brownies weren’t even close; I put foil over the pan and baked it for another fifteen minutes. The brownies ended up pretty moist, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and I liked the crispy cookie layer. If I ever had the occasion to make these again, I would probably bake the brownies before adding the cookie layer for a more even consistency. These brownies reminded me of the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream flavor Half Baked, so I decided I should make ice cream to accompany them. I thought about making vanilla ice cream and mixing in bits of the brownies, but in the “playing around” section of the recipe, Dorie mentions adding peanut butter chips to the cookie layer, so I made Peanut Butter Ice Cream from The Perfect Scoop.

This is the second week in a row that I have liked the TWD recipe more than I anticipated. Unlike Mr. Penpen, who thought I should add peanut butter cups to the ice cream, I am not normally one for over-the-top gooey desserts, but I thought these were delicious. However, they are a bit dangerous to have around, so I am happy I sent most of them out of the house! I gave this recipe an 8 for Deliciousness and a 3 for Effort, giving it an EDR of 2.66. Many thanks to Beth of Supplicious for choosing this fun treat. You can find the recipe on Beth’s site and see what the other bakers thought via the TWD blogroll.

Oh, so not exactly relevant to baking, but to this post: I lost all my process photos. I don’t always take process pictures, but I was baking on a relaxed Saturday afternoon, so I did. I recently acquired a DSLR camera, which I still haven’t mastered, but I have yet to purchase a decent-size memory card. I had a Canon Elph before the Rebel, and I could go for months before filling up my two one-gigabyte cards. However, this new camera eats up memory almost as fast as my dog devours her dinner, so I’m constantly erasing photos and reformatting the cards. Anyway, today I hit reformat, forgetting that I hadn’t transferred my pictures from Saturday to my computer. My devoted boyfriend diligently researched ways to recover the photos and found a couple programs that will do the job. Naturally, the free software he found didn’t work and we’re not about to spend $40 to recover pictures of brownies and our dog: I had a few treats left for the plate shot and Eloise is still cute.