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If you are looking at these brownies thinking..."those are undercooked"....you would be correct. I got sidetracked with a phone call and although I cooked them for the required 25 minutes, plus another couple minutes for good measure, I pulled them out without doing the toothpick test. The book specifically said not to over cook, so I was erring on the side of caution.

This is the first recipe I have cooked from the Skewer It! book. Many of you probably have other books penned by the Corpening twins --I think their Smoothies books (or card decks) published by Chronicle are very popular. I needed a tasty treat to take to a holiday party, and wanted to do one more cookie or some sort of sweet before I officially get off the holiday dessert wagon and onto some New Year's party fare or hors d'oeuvres. This recipe looked simple, I had all the ingredients on hand (except the candy canes), and the picture in the book was very cute.

The first step was to make a fudgy brownie batter. Chocolate, a TON of butter, eggs, vanilla, and flour were all I needed. The batter was easy enough to make. The tough part was actually locating the miniature candy canes to skewer them with. One would think small candy canes would be easy to find the week before Christmas, but you would be wrong. I went to a Walgreens, Rainbow grocery, and two Safeways, before finding them. Everyone seems to be stocking up on the XL candy canes, or the Starburst flavored canes seem to be quite the rage (can someone explain this to me?). Rainbow grocers (an amazing natural foods co-op here in SF) had amazing candy canes, but only in the large sizes. They were beautifully rustic in appearance with an off white base and deep rusty red striping made from natural dyes or coloring -- they won't carry candy canes with the red dye in them.

The biggest hassle with this recipe was that you really had to let the brownies cool completely before you tried to cut them into perfect 1-inch cubes. The picture in the book show brownies that literally look like pieces of fudge with corners so sharp you could poke an eye out. My brownies, as you can see, look nothing like that. I tend to think that even if I cooked them more, they would never look quite that clean and precise. I will say, although they weren't pretty -- hot out of the oven these brownies tasted damn good. I ended up putting them in the refrigerator for a few hours, and they hardened up enough that I was able to skewer them, place them in individual red cupcake wrappers, sprinkle them with powdered sugar, and take them to my potluck. People seemed to like them, they have a high cute factor.

I would try these one more time to see if I could get the brownies right. Other than the hours and hours of cooling they were easy, cute, tasty, and festive.

In some of the early entries on this site I didn't request permission to run the recipe I was writing about from the publisher so it won't appear here. The majority of entries on 101 Cookbooks will have the recipes attached, this just happens to be one of the ones that doesn't.

From: Skewer It! Page: 97

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