Nutella Brownie

I know, I know... Nutella again?


I actually made these quite some time back. It was still school term and in the midst of the hustle and bustle, I decided to take a short break and do some baking. It has been getting harder for me to find time to bake lately, so I've just been making use of any free time I've had.

Unlike my Nutella Pound Cake, these brownies were delish. I've only tried making brownies a couple of times before and I only found them okay-ish. Yeah, they tasted chocolate-y and all, but they just weren't wonderful or anything. They were just very normal, very average brownies.

This one was different. I'm personally a big fan of chewy brownies, and these Nutella Brownies turned out to be just that! The Nutella taste was subtle yet present; while I thought it was just right, a friend suggested I should increase the amount next time. The best thing about these though, in my opinion, is the texture. Also, a big plus is that they are super easy to make!

Photobucket

I got the brownie recipe from Life's Ambrosia (I'm rather ashamed to say that I am far too inexperienced to actually try experimenting and creating my own recipes). Click on the link for the recipe!

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Written on Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 10:57 PM by huis

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Failures and More

So in my previous post, I blogged briefly about my rather disastrous baking outcome this afternoon. I don't want to go into too much of the painful details, so I'll let the pictures do the talking:

ew

This, my friends, is a Nutella Pound Cake. Or at least, it was supposed to be one. I took the recipe from Dana Treat, and the photos looked so incredibly yummy that I had to try it out for myself.

So confident I was that it was going to turn out a success that I didn't even check my oven settings.

Now, my oven is still relatively new and I'm still not too familiar with it. I suppose that's also partly the reason why I didn't notice that the oven was at the "spit-roasting chicken" setting instead of the normal "oven" setting.

My poor pound cake was charcoal black (at least on the top) within minutes!

Even so, I wasn't disheartened. I changed the setting back, thinking that I could just slice off the top layer of the cake later on. All seemed fine and dandy again. Then, I took out the cake, waited for it to cool (45 minutes to be safe) and tried to slice them.

They were stuck to my brand-new loaf tin. I must have put too little oil, or perhaps it was because I neglected flouring the tin, as usually I find spreading oil more than enough. Anyway, the cake turned out terribly un-cakeish. It tasted pretty okay, but appearance-wise it was just sad. The remains went into a plastic bag and down the rubbish chute.

Oh well.

I was planning to bake another cake tonight, but I got too tired and I don't think I want to see, taste or smell Nutella for some time, shocking as that may seem. So I cooked dinner instead -


Black Pepper Prawns from noobcook.com, my go-to for quick and yummy recipes!

And can I just say this - these were DELICIOUS. I can't get enough of the sauce. I didn't have peppercorn so I just used lots and lots of black pepper and it was good, but next time I'm going to try this with peppercorn. The sauce is addictive, especially with white rice!


Sesame Oil Chicken, also from Noob Cook.

This dish is comfort food - I love sesame oil and since young this has always been one of the dishes I would order from the economical rice stall. Finally, I get to re-create it! Mine turned out a bit bland though, another careless mistake - I forgot to adjust the amount of ingredients according to the amount of chicken I had.

And lastly, some random vegetable dish (broccoli and lettuce) that I quickly whipped up because, you know, vegetables are essential for completing a healthy meal!


Not exactly my best day at culinary attempts, it seems. It's disappointing, but at the same time it's failures like this that make me more determined to make my next attempt a great one. We all have to start somewhere, don't we? And one day when I stop feeling sick over the thought of Nutella, I'm going to give that pound cake a go again (with correct oven settings, of course!).

(So I wanted to post another much more successful baking attempt that I made a couple weeks ago, but as this post is getting too long already, I'm going to double-post! Phew - new post in a bit!)

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Written on at 9:40 PM by huis

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Lesson

Today, I learnt the hard way that you should ALWAYS check your oven settings before attempting to bake anything.

Still, I'm not going to give up. Attempt #2 tonight. Also, the revival of this poor forgotten blog!

The three-month break from school should mean that I have more time to bake and get this blog up and revving. Should. Huh. What with my upcoming internship, Honours Thesis prep, tutoring on the side, piano, and etc etc., I don't actually know for sure. But I'm gonna try!

:)
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Written on at 4:06 PM by huis

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