baking with herbgirl - brownie edition

As promised here is my little lesson on baking brownies from scratch. i will try to make it as easy as possible. if you can follow directions, you will have no problem with this.

For starters, a few things you should know that will *instantly* make you a better baker-

-accuracy is crucial because baking is all about chemical reactions and science and shit so follow the recipe exactly unless you know what you are doing! and read the whole motherfucker first too so you know that you have all ingredients and supplies required.

-measure liquid ingredients properly by using a clear spouted measuring cup set on a counter. read the liquid level at eye level while the cup is still on the counter.

-measure dry ingredients properly using a nested set of measuring cups or measuring spoons. lightly spoon ingredient into measuring cup and then scrape level with a knife, spatula or other straight edge. with measuring spoons scoop into the container then scrape the top to level it. or forget all that shit and go get a baking scale.

-have all of your ingredients at room temperature - they blend better that way

-follow the mixing order of the ingredients carefully - it does make a difference - remember science and shit!

-use a light hand while mixing - over mixing drives air out of a mixture and will make things tough. has something to do with gluten strands - see! science shit again!

-don't forget to preheat the oven before you start! this one is kind of a given, but if you leave a mixed batter sitting while you wait for the oven to heat up, the air goes out of it and can leave a dense end product.

-prepare your pan properly by greasing thoroughly with shortening, butter or cooking spray then flouring it, tapping flour to cover all the corners and edges then tapping out the excess flour. or you could use baking spray. just make sure that it is covered well. finishing a baked good only to have it cling to the pan like glue is a motherfucker. then you have to dig it out with a fork - it ain't pretty, you know with the ensuing tears and all. dignity goes out the window on this one.

-cooling is part of the baking process... repeat after me... cooling is part of the baking process. the physical structure of the baked good sets and firms as it cools. cutting into a baked good before it is cool also allows moisture to escape so your shit goes stale faster and your brownies will get this weird crystallized texture. if you leave it in the pan to cool completely, it will get a soggy bottom and stuff will stick to the pan because the fat you greased it with hardens. after the pan is cool enough to handle, flip the item onto a cooling rack.



Now that i've shared some general baking wisdom, on to the recipe!

PRESENTING....

~HERBGIRL'S CHEWY BROWNIES~

Hardware
8x8, 9x9 or 12 cavity muffin pan or a 9x13 pan for a double recipe
stand mixer, hand mixer, or bitchin' biceps
wooden spoon
rubber spatula
fork
knife
whisk
large bowl
smaller bowls
1 cup pyrex measuring cup
measuring spoon set
measuring cup set
double boiler - mine is a stainless bowl on top of a saucepan -nothing fancy
cooling rack or toaster oven rack
cookie sheet

Software
8 T unsalted infused butter, melted (simmered with a sticky zephyr ion bag)
4 oz unsweetened chocolate
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/4 tsp salt
2 t vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1 c (4.5oz) all purpose flour minus the amount of ABV
2 T natural cocoa
finely ground ABV (15 g for this batch)
up to 1 c 'extras' such as reeces, m&ms, walnuts, mint chips, rocky road (chocolate chips, marshmallow and nuts) cream cheese, cherry preserves, you get the idea.
fat of choice for the pan
flour for the pan

before you start, make infused butter - cut zephyr bag into strips and place with butter in the double boiler on low, i let it warm for a few hours because that's just the way the day went, then i squeezed the butter out of the strips and kind of squeegeed them with my fingers. got about 2/3 rds of it back so i added in extra plain butter to make up the full amount. in retrospect, i lost a lot of butter to the strips so i would probably use some water in with it and let it solidify in the fridge so i didn't lose as much. oh well live and learn.

Measure out the ingredients you can into the bowls they will be used from thusly -



butter in the double boiler bowl, chocolate is those white squares.
sugar and salt in one bowl, vanilla added later
Flour, cocoa and ABV (later combined with the whisk) in another large bowl,
beat eggs together with a fork in another
'chunks' in yet another

position an oven rack in the middle and preheat oven to 350 degrees



grease and flour the pan



with melted butter in the double boiler, add the chocolate and melt over low heat, stirring frequently with the spatula. remove from heat and allow to cool slightly.




blend sugar, salt and vanilla in mixer bowl on low speed until mixed then turn off mixer



add butter and chocolate mixture to the mixer bowl and mix on low speed until thoroughly incorporated, stopping the mixer occasionally to scrape the sides



mix in eggs, one at a time (i beat these in a bowl beforehand and add half at a time) beating each on low or medium low until incorporated. this pic shows just before incorporation



meaning, you watch the batter carefully until you see no more streaks of egg then you add the next one. stop the mixer


now add the flour, cocoa, ABV mixture to the mixer bowl and mix on low for a minute or so, stop and scrape down the bowl, then mix for another minute or so until the batter is smooth. just enough so that there is no powder left to be seen in the bowl. it will be more like a dough than a batter at this point.

dump in chunks and mix gently and thoroughly with the wooden spoon, or in my case, the beater from the mixer, but not the mixer itself.



put mixture in prepared pan and spread as evenly as possible



put in the oven on the middle of the center rack (the round thing on the bottom of the oven is my pizza stone, i leave it on the bottom of the oven at all times to act as a heat sink and even out oven temperature)



bake for 30-45 minutes depending upon pan size and color. thin dark 9x9 metal pans take less time than a thick glass 8x8

it is done when a toothpick or skewer inserted into the center comes out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it, the top will be uniformly colored with no indentations.


set the pan on a cooling rack until cool enough you can handle it, run a knife along the inside edge to loosen it up, then flip onto the back of a cookie sheet then back onto the cooling rack (makes sense right? so the top is facing up?) that's my awesome honey wheat bread in the background sharing cooling rack space



defend with your life until completely cooled, sneak some crumbs for yourself, then cut into 16 squares.



enjoy



Notes
1 Cup of reeces is borderline too much in this recipe. any more and they would have fallen apart , but they were delicious! :mmm:
in my 9x9 dark metal nonstick pan, 30 minutes was plenty - i left them in for 35 and they were crunchy on the edges but still very tasty, very little weedy flavor.
they are great with chocolate milk
last night, one and a vape had me ready to go to bed, but DH was up till 4 am brainstorming business stuff - he swears this is brownie related but i just think it is the excitement of starting a new business.

anyway, it was fun to put this lesson together, hope you enjoyed it. please try the recipe and ask for clarifications or whatever. I am happy to help!

Thanks herb girl for posting this! I've been checking incessantly for the past few days for this recipe! Think ive got around 15g abv saved, so I may give this a go soon! I'll let you know how it goes....but the instructions are very clear, should be easy enough

other technical notes that i forgot to add...
i simmered the butter and bag strips for so long i drove off some of the water in the butter as well. adding the butter back in to make up the amount had less water in it than the original amount of butter should have had.
basically i was baking with a substance closer to ghee than butter. ghee is simply butter that has had all the water and milk solids removed. this affected the baking, i think, as the butter was bubbling through the batter as it was baking. that does not usually happen, but i feel that the butter having less water in it contributed to this, normally that extra liquid would have been water and evaporated off. i don't feel that it affected the end result.

most of the the too many reeces that i crammed into these brownies split open and released some of their contents as well. didn't look pretty, mostly it stayed inside the shell, but i think some oil escaped and contributed to the fat that was bubbling through the brownies as well. once again, no effect on the final result. but i would back it off to 3/4 of a cup of reeces. nuts and things like that can still go to a cup.

you could halve the recipe and bake it as six muffins, you may even be able to quarter it and bake it in a small tin in the oven or a very large mug in the microwave , but i wouldn't recommend it, you really do need certain amounts of thinks to make the science work. but if you succeed (or fail), please share!!!

Herbgirl,
What is a zephyr ion bag? Isn't that a vaporizer? How big do these strips have to be? I'll do a practice run first without abv. I would hate to screw this up and waste all my abv. Thanks for the recipe.

Thanks for the recipe herbgirl!

I saw this thread last night and the pictures you posted made the idea of abv Reeses brownies irresistible! Just made a batch and had a piece about an hour ago and I'm feeling pretty good already They were delicious as well!

Pinoy, a zephyr ion is indeed a bag vape. it uses special plastic bags to catch the vapor and they get sticky after a while. i cut the bag into long strips, maybe 2 inches wide and as long as the bag was. i just kind of put them in the bowl with the butter and turned the heat to low, stirring occasionally for what ended up being 3 or 4 hours. i think the strips could be any size and it should work. i would think that any vape bag made out of oven safe plastic would be fine as well.

danalee, you are correct - reeces brownies with ABV FTW!
did you use the full cup of pieces? it really makes for one chock full brownie almost to the point of ridiculousness!

glad you enjoyed the recipe! what should i do next? maybe muffins - or i just created a recipe for jalepeno cheddar jack bread that would be fun to profile.
we'll see.

if any of you out there in FC land dig this please post and let me know - if there is enough interest i will do it regularly, maybe a monthly thing, maybe take some requests to ABVize some good eats!

Thanks!
Lo, i know, right. i really do try and stay away from the junk but i figure if i'm baking it from scratch and not getting the preservatives... rationalize...
licking the crumbs off my fingers now - i really like the way these things medicate. not too much and not too little. i am fully functional with these things, unlike the last batch of brownies where the effect was very long lived - like we felt it the next day long lived. these are much more tolerable. the blend of the ABV and the bag residue is a winner for sure.

Haha I actually took your advice and used 3/4 c. of Reeses instead of the full cup and my brownies turned out pretty close to flawless! A little bit crumbly but I'm attributing that to my impatience in not letting them cool enough

Jalapeno Cheddar Jack Bread sounds phenomenal, especially since I have never tried any sort of savoury edible. I've also been curious about making some sort of Cannabis-influenced Cheesecake! Maybe Cherry, or Strawberry.... or really anything since cheesecake is my decadent addiction

Nice recipe, thanks for posting it. the next time I have enough avb to experiment with I am going to make these, but I might make a non medicated batch in the meantime

i know what i'm making friday night

Brilliant, Brilliant, Brilliant!!,.. the brownie recipe is very keen but I must applaud your general baking wisdom tips.

awww, shucks, y'all are making be blush

good to know that there is some interest!

danalee, the crumbly texture could also be due to something as crazy as how much moisture is in the atmosphere at the time of baking, dry air tends to shorten baking times so it's easy to over bake - especially something dark colored like brownies. science strikes again!

the cheddar jack quick bread is something i made up a few weeks back when i needed to use up some jalapenos (i also made some jalapeno cheddar artisan bread yummmm) , i've only done it once, but it seems that it would lend itself beautifully to an application like this. I have never tried a savory baked good edible. closest i've gotten to that was dumping herb into mac & cheese while camping maybe 18 years ago.

i'd have to scale it back to make a single loaf, but i believe it would be doable. it was sooooooo goooood. still have a loaf in the freezer.

i've never actually made cheesecake before - it will give me a new challenge - i'll think on it.

cherry probably because i already have some homemade cherry preserves put up that i could use to make the topping.

alright now, everybody send me your ABV so i can get to bakin'!!!

Nice recipe! My EQV bag is sticking together now, so I know it needs to be replaced soon. I already made a batch of brownies with my ABV a few weeks ago and don't have more than 10 grams right now. Would simmering the bag pieces in butter produce any stoney effects at all without ABV? I'd probably mix the butter into a cookie brownie.

cutepanda, thanks!
the sticky in the bag is basically wand hash. my assumption is that it contains a full spectrum of actives.

if you just use the bag, i suggest using either use two bags for one recipe or make a recipe with a smaller yield. that being said, my tolerance is pretty high so YMMV

Yeah I think that 1 bag simmered in butter would not be enough for an 8 x 8 pan of whatever. I'll probably just save the bag till its time to make brownies again next month before my roadtrip home from college. Thanks for your input!

no problem panda- please share your results with us!

I just made these brownies with white chocolate chips and peanut buttercups, they were amazing!! thanks for the recipe

can you mix fresh and avb herb?

yes !

Thinking about trying this recipe. If substituting ABV for fresh, what would you guys recommend for dosage? Does 5g sound reasonable? Any help is really appreciated

I would put as much as i could part with personally, but i have a high tolerance and love too-stoney edibles.