Tuesdays With Dorie: Brownie Buttons

The best-laid plans of mice and mothers …

So, this week’s Tuesdays With Dorie recipe was Brownie Buttons (chosen for us by Jayma of Two Scientists Experimenting in the Kitchen), which I thought would be perfect (in their unadorned state) for our Civil Air Patrol squadron’s cookout. I quadrupled the recipe, giving me (I hoped) 64 little bits of brownies to be inhaled by the cadets and their parents.

And you know what? Trust the recipe. Don’t be thinking “Oh, she can’t mean that. It must be a typo. I’ll just do it my way.”

Because you’ll be wrong.

It says to use mini muffin pans. Check. It says to put a teaspoon of batter in each. Check. But it also says that that teaspoon will fill the cups about two-thirds full. Not check. So I used a tablespoon of batter, which did.

And the brownies baked fine. They came out of the oven. They were delicious, warm and cocoa-y and melty in my mouth. But there was no way I was going to get 64. So for the third batch I dropped back to a teaspoon of batter.

And they also baked fine, delicious, warm, etc. But then I dropped the fourth batch, losing most of them to the searing heat. And then I burned the fifth and sixth batches. And then I gave up.

So I didn’t take them to CAP, which made me very sad. But #1 Son saved the day yet again, first by making oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and oatmeal raisin cookies for the cookout and second by suggesting that the brownies we did have would be good as ice cream mix-ins.

As happens fairly often, he was right.

He suggested peanut butter ice cream, but I went with a flavor from Perfect Scoop that I’ve been wanting to try for ages: Vietnamese coffee. It’s just condensed milk mixed with and equal amount of extra-strong coffee (I used the cold-brewed decaf I always have in the fridge) and a little half-and-half and vanilla. The mixture was too sweet, but once it was frozen it was perfect. And #1 Son was right: The brownies were delicious in it. And under it. And near it.

Try the brownies (either buy the book or visit Jayma’s blog for the recipe). Just don’t use too much batter. And check out the hundreds of variations produced by the Tuesdays With Dorie bloggers.