Black Cocoa, Blah Brownies: Salty Super Dark Chocolate Brownies

While I had my Ovenly cookbook out (to make Mustard Spice Cookies), I decided to also try the recipe for "Salty Super Dark Chocolate Brownies." I've started keeping black cocoa on hand, and the photo of the coal-black brownie in the cookbook was so alluring. 

To make the brownie batter, you whisk together all of the liquid ingredients (eggs, cooled melted butter, sugar, and dark brown sugar) in one bowl; sift together all of the dry ingredients (natural cocoa powder, flour, dark Dutch-process cocoa powder, ground espresso, and salt) in another; and add the dry ingredients into the wet. You pour the batter into a pan (I lined mine with parchment), sprinkle on Maldon salt, and bake. I should note that the Ovenly cookbook does not include ingredient weights, but David Lebovitz featured this recipe on his blog and included weights. So I used the weights he listed.
My brownies did not look all that dark. The recipe calls for four times more natural cocoa powder than Dutch-process cocoa (the black cocoa I used), so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the final product isn't black -- but the brownie in the cookbook photo looks pretty close to black. I thought these brownies were mediocre. The flavor was not particularly interesting. Yes, they had a nice hit of salt, but that's about it. But the unforgivable sin was that the brownies were cakey. I followed the recipe directions to bake them for 35 minutes, until a toothpick came out clean. I failed to notice that David Leibowitz says you should bake the brownies until the center is almost but not quite set. He gives a baking time of 25 minutes -- and recommends checking them at the 20-minute mark. So perhaps the cakey texture was just a result of my overbaking them. But even if I could improve the texture, there's nothing about this brownie that makes me want to try the recipe again.

Recipe: "Salty Super Dark Chocolate Brownies" from Ovenly by Agatha Kulaga and Erin Patinkin

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