Baked Sunday Mornings: Spicy Brownies

I've made a lot of Baked brownies in my time -- the original Baked Brownie and the Baked Sweet and Salty Brownie are my go-to brownie recipes. The Baked boys know their brownies, and when I did a quasi-systematic taste test of brownies last summer, these two brownies took second and first place, respectively. Matt and Renato's new book Baked Elements has a new brownie recipe that is this week's Baked Sunday Mornings assignment: Spicy Brownies. It's almost exactly the same as the original Baked Brownie recipe (which is also virtually the same as the Sweet and Salty Brownie recipe minus the salted caramel), except that it omits the vanilla and espresso powder and includes ancho chile powder, cinnamon, and ground ginger. And while the original brownie calls for dark chocolate only, the spicy brownie uses mostly dark chocolate with a little bit of milk chocolate thrown in.

To make these brownies, you melt the butter with dark and milk chocolate in a double boiler, add sugar and brown sugar, and let the mixture come to room temperature. Then you incorporate room temperature eggs, fold in the dry ingredients (flour, cocoa powder, ancho chile powder, cinnamon, ground ginger, and salt), and bake. The recipe says to use 2 teaspoons of freshly grated cinnamon, and to be honest, I found that fairly annoying -- I don't know anyone who grates her own cinnamon (Exception: just a few weeks ago, David Lebovitz posted about grating his own cinnamon for a cake recipe, but I think we can all agree that David Lebovitz is not your average home cook.) I don't even know where to get the correct variety of cinnamon bark that is appropriate for grating, because hard grocery store cinnamon sticks aren't really going to cut it. So I just used a teaspoon of Penzey's Vietnamese Extra Fancy Cinnamon, which is pretty potent.

Not surprisingly, these brownies looked just like The Baked Brownie. They also had the same rich and fudgy texture. The taste is difficult to describe. Contrary to the name, they weren't actually spicy -- ancho chiles are fairly mild, and combined with the cinnamon, the brownies had a smokey, warm flavor. It might have just been my mind playing tricks on me, but I swear that I got the sensation of a cool finish from the ginger.

All in all, I found the flavor odd, although not unpleasant. I think I might have liked the brownies better if they were spicier; the recipe apparently originally used chipotle powder, but Matt and Renato thought "it was probably too hard a kick, so we veered toward the smoother, subtler, smokier ancho chile." I definitely prefer the original Baked Brownie, which is the paragon of classic brownie flavor.

Recipe: "Spicy Brownies" from Baked Elements: Our 10 Favorite Ingredients, by Matt Lewis and Renato Poliafito, recipe available here at Baked Sunday Mornings.

Previous Posts:

• "The Brownie Tasteoff Finals: a Brownie Champion Is Crowned," September 27, 2011.
• "Brownie Tasteoff, Round 1: Classic Brownies," July 6, 2011.
• "Quick Bites: Swedish Visiting Cake and The Baked Brownie," January 14, 2009.