One recipe that caught my eye when I flipped through Dorie Greenspan's Baking: From My Home to Yours, was "White Chocolate Brownies." I noticed it instantly because the large accompanying photo is striking; it shows a lovely pale bar, studded with raspberries, covered in a layer of lightly browned meringue. Meringue? I've never made a bar with meringue before and I was intrigued. Plus, these bars have the same almond-white chocolate-raspberry flavor profile as one of my favorite bars of all time, the Pillsbury Bakeoff Raspberry-Filled White Chocolate Bar, so I had high expectations.
The bottom layer of this bar is made from melted white chocolate and butter, sugar, orange zest, eggs, vanilla, flour, ground almonds, and salt. You spread the batter into a pan, and sprinkle fresh raspberries on top. Then you spread on a layer of meringue made from egg whites, salt, and sugar.
The photo of the bar in the cookbook shows a pristine, gracefully contoured, unbroken layer of meringue on top. My meringue became quite puffy and misshapen in the oven, and parts of it collapsed and cracked upon cooling. Also, when I pulled the cooled bars out of the pan by grabbing onto the parchment paper I had used to line the pan, the bars flexed and the meringue cracked even more. So the result is what you see in the photo above -- completely cracked meringue. Also, as you can see, my meringue started weeping by the time I took the photo, which was the day after I baked the bars. However, I don't consider this a significant problem because: 1) the weeping was minimal, and 2) even the meringue on the cookbook's picture-perfect bar is visibly weeping.
The recipe does not direct you to test the cake for doneness, but only instructs you to bake the cake for "30 to 35 minutes, or until the meringue is browned and crackly and the brownies pull away from the sides of pan." When I cut my bars, I discovered that the bottom layer was quite wet and definitely could have used some more time in the oven. If you try this recipe, I would recommend that you actually test the cake for doneness with a toothpick instead of just eyeballing the color of the meringue.
I don't think that I will be making this recipe again. Although the layer of meringue on top is certainly interesting and different, the meringue doesn't really add much taste-wise, and the bars themselves don't have much flavor, either. I could hardly taste the almonds, and the main flavors of the bar were white chocolate and orange. Plus, the meringue makes these bars fragile and they don't keep well. This bar seems like a fabulous idea, but at least for me, the execution just fell flat.
Recipe: "White Chocolate Brownies" from Baking: From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan.
The bottom layer of this bar is made from melted white chocolate and butter, sugar, orange zest, eggs, vanilla, flour, ground almonds, and salt. You spread the batter into a pan, and sprinkle fresh raspberries on top. Then you spread on a layer of meringue made from egg whites, salt, and sugar.
The recipe does not direct you to test the cake for doneness, but only instructs you to bake the cake for "30 to 35 minutes, or until the meringue is browned and crackly and the brownies pull away from the sides of pan." When I cut my bars, I discovered that the bottom layer was quite wet and definitely could have used some more time in the oven. If you try this recipe, I would recommend that you actually test the cake for doneness with a toothpick instead of just eyeballing the color of the meringue.
I don't think that I will be making this recipe again. Although the layer of meringue on top is certainly interesting and different, the meringue doesn't really add much taste-wise, and the bars themselves don't have much flavor, either. I could hardly taste the almonds, and the main flavors of the bar were white chocolate and orange. Plus, the meringue makes these bars fragile and they don't keep well. This bar seems like a fabulous idea, but at least for me, the execution just fell flat.
Recipe: "White Chocolate Brownies" from Baking: From My Home to Yours, by Dorie Greenspan.
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