Swirl Supremacy

On two occasions recently, I’ve been asked by members of my adoring public which recipe from this project is my favorite. There have been plenty of bakes this year that I’ve liked a lot — the blog-launching chocolate chip cookies, the chocolate crinkles — but, until recently, I had one definitive fave. Cream Cheese Brownies, as featured in my May brownie roundup, are sent from God.

Those bad boys are soft and gooey, multi-layered, and, as an added bonus, located right at the sweet spot between “I put so little effort in that people will think these are store-bought” and “I worked so hard on these that I must now collapse.” They were by far my #1 pick out of all the recipes to date.

But this month, a competitor emerged — and folks, I’m seeing a pattern.

White Chocolate Swirl Brownies, pictured above, are also nearly perfect. The rubric for these was to take the white chocolate brownies from my last bake and swirl them through with dollops of truffly milk chocolate. (The book offered a raspberry version too, but, like, screw fruit.) I assumed I would like these since I liked the white chocolate brownies perfectly well, but I was not prepared for just how great they’d be.

The central challenge of this project has been eating these whole batches on my own. If my boyfriend can split my spoils with me then it’s not so bad, but until this recipe, I’d never once polished off a full traybake without help. With White Chocolate Swirl Brownies, though? I pounded back the whole thing in five days.

This bake was, again, ooey-gooey and chocolatey with a nice, complementary set of flavors. As photos can attest, it had basically all the features I liked about the Cream Cheese Brownies — just in reverse. These blondies were the evil twin of those brownies, the id to their ego, their photonegative shadow self. And the greatness of them both makes me think that we should stop making brownies that aren’t swirled.

Just a pair of blurry, delicious twins

I’m confined by the contents of this book, of course, and unfortunately, there aren’t any more swirl recipes in the next few bakes. But if you ask me to recommend a dessert for your next function, the answer is clear: swirl one thing with another thing, and let the compliments roll in.