It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane!
Remember the phase of quarantine where everyone was obsessed with cakes that don’t look like cake? There were chickens that turned out to be chocolate, romaine that turned into red velvet — it was a confusing time. We’d all seen illusion cakes before, of course (Duff Goldman didn’t have the Food Network in a death grip fifteen years ago for nothing), but they really made a resurgence last summer. And in my latest bake, they surged again.
Recipe 29 in 100 Cookies turns the brownie genre on its head a bit by replacing the, you know, brown with a pale white-chocolate base. White Chocolate Brownies seemed tasty, if a little boring, so I gave them a go. I’ll spoil the ending here by saying that they did turn out fine, but friends, this bake broke my brain.
The brownie that broke me
We’ll start with the prep. As with all the brownie recipes in this book, I started my process by melting down the chocolate required with a [redacted, obscene amount] of butter on the stove. I’ve done this a million times now, and with regular chocolate, it’s always gone fine and has landed me with a product that looks like it belongs in dessert. With white chocolate, though? Guys, this was a bechamel. It wasn’t literally — when you tasted it, it was in fact white chocolate-y — but, for all the world, the visual impression of this step was a creamy, salty cheese sauce ready to pour on top of some steaming macaroni. It was disturbing.
Still, though, I poured my faux-bechamel into my batter, popped it into the oven, and emerged an hour later with…a tray of cornbread.
Tell me this isn’t cornbread. Or, like, a cheesy casserole at best.
That’s what this looked like! It was golden, it was fluffy, and it resembled no baked good I’d ever seen except an old-fashioned cornbread slab. At this point, my brain was basically curdled, just like it was last summer. Can I trust anything I look at to be what I think it is? If that bechamel sauce is white chocolate and that cornbread is somehow brownies, what else in my home is messed up? Are those hydrangeas actually tissue paper? Is that barstool secretly made of soap? And most importantly, HOW MUCH OF THIS APARTMENT IS CAKE?!
As I said, the flavor of these brownies was perfectly yummy, and if you set aside the mind-bend of the bechamel, the prep was easy, too. But I was damaged by these brownies. Each time I picked up a new one, I thought to myself, “Cornbread.” If you’re a lover of white chocolate, then sure, I guess I’d recommend making and eating this traybake — but, uh, maybe do it with your eyes closed.