Now These Are Brownies!

Once again, most importantly, if you haven’t yet done so, get yourself over to Culinate and enter the Death by Chocolate contest to win a trip for 2 to Napa Valley and then vote for me so that I can meet you there! Just click on the pretty chocolate button. Once you’ve done that, come on back to read about Strawberry Banana Brownies.

After teasing you with Peanut Butter Blondies, I thought it was only fair that I post about some real brownies. Because talking about brownies while showing you blondies is just mean. It’s like when Mom says something like “I was going to get you (insert present here) but then wasn’t sure if you’d like it, so I got you nothing.” Inevitably, the present in question was something awesome like a cookbook and of course I would have wanted it! It really doesn’t even matter what it was, it’s a present, and who doesn’t like unexpected gifts? No one.

These brownies were my own concoction as I’ve had a craving for banana bread lately, but wanted something with more chocolate. It was then that I remembered a post I did a long time ago for the Brownie Babe blogging event about Banana Brownies. Although I’m sure those brownies were tasty, (they had cacao nibs in them, of course they were!) I didn’t want to make them again. As I’ve stated before, I generally don’t like to make the same thing twice unless it was really amazing and even then I’ll be tempted to change something about it to try to make it even better. Today, for example, I knew I had some dried strawberries in the cupboard that would be an excellent addition to any brownie. I also thought those strawberries would be particularly good if they were flamed in rum. This is a technique that I’ve been a fan of ever since I made a Dorie Greenspan recipe that required me to flame prunes in armagnac. Now I use it anytime I used dried fruit in a recipe. While I’m handing out tips worth their weight in gold, here’s another one that I learned from Dorie: whenever adding zest to a recipe, use your fingers to rub it into the sugar instead of just tossing it willy nilly into the batter. Two great tips in one post, what more do you want from me?

If you’d like some more white chocolate in your life, try these White Chocolate Almond Cookies, another recipe that came out of my Allrecipes.com Tried & True Cookies book. They were originally supposed to be White Chocolate Macadamia Cookies, but all I had were almonds and seeing as though the batter called for almond extract anyways, I figured it would be a good swap. It was.

Bri’s Strawberry Banana Brownies

1 cup all purpose flour

½ cup cocoa

1 tsp baking powder

½ tsp salt

2 eggs

¼ cup brown sugar

½ cup white sugar

2 bananas, mashed

1/3 cup vegetable oil

1 tsp vanilla

2 oz milk chocolate, chopped

½ cup dried strawberries, chopped

2 oz white chocolate

Preheat the oven to 350F. Line a 9x9 inch baking pan with parchment paper.

In a small saucepan combine the dried strawberries with 1/3 cup water, bring to a boil. Watch to make sure the fruit does not scorch. When almost all of the water has been absorbed, removed from the heat, add a splash of rum and light on fire. Let the alcohol burn off. Set aside.

Whisk together the flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt. In a separate bowl whisk together eggs, sugars, bananas, oil and vanilla. Add the dry ingredients to the wet and stir to combine. Stir in the strawberries and any remaining rum as well as the chopped chocolate.

Scrape the batter into the pan and bake for 20-24 minutes until the top is dry and springy to the touch. Allow to cool in the pan before unmolding.

To top, melt white chocolate in the microwave or over a double boiler and drizzle overtop of the cooled brownies.

Vote for me in the Death by Chocolate contest

Technorati Tags:

Brownies + Baking + Chocolate + Bananas