Antonia is a co-worker who likes my baking so much that it inspires me to try making new things, and she needed something decadent. I love a good baking assignment, so I narrowed it down to three choices, and let Nathaniel cast the deciding vote. It took him about three seconds.
This was one of those times when I didn’t look for ways to lighten up the recipe. I used all purpose flour, lots of butter, 4 eggs, and more than 2 cups of sugar. I also got to use espresso powder, which always makes feel good, since it was a birthday present.
First things first: two sticks of butter. Pot. Stove.
While that was melting, I got the eggs out. Nathaniel was there for the cracking of the first egg.
(He’s not naked, by the way. Pants are on.)
He didn’t even crack the egg all the way before he got egg-shy, being fresh from the shower and wanting to avoid having to wash up again, so he handed it off to me and I cracked that one plus three more.
To the eggs I added cocoa powder, salt, baking powder, vanilla, and the espresso powder mixed with a few teaspoons of water.
The directions said to whisk it all together, which was a bit of a challenge as it started to thicken. I think my poor whisk got one of its wiry bits stretched. I’m still hoping it will recover.
After that I added sugar and the melted butter, and used the sturdy spatula to mix everything until well combined.
Then it was time to add the flour. I stirred it in, then set that bowl aside and got out a new one. In went the cream cheese, one egg yolk, and three tablespoons of sugar.
Honestly, once I had it thoroughly mixed I thought it looked a lot like egg salad. Fortunately it didn’t smell like egg salad. That would have been disturbing.
Doesn’t it look like egg salad?
I dug out my one remaining pastry bag, I even found a tip for it, and stuffed the mixture in.
This recipe has a lot of moving parts. I went back to the brownie batter, armed with a cookie scoop. If I had a smaller one, I think it would have served me better here, but I didn’t, so here we are.
I should have been more vigilant about how much ended up in each cup.
Then I went back to the pastry bag. The only tip I had for it was really more of a thin decorating tip than a wide batter trip, so this was when it really stopped looking anything like the pictures in the recipe.
Yeah. Weird.
Then I definitely made the scoops on top of that too big. I should have used a teaspoon.
The muffins took much longer than the recipe said to bake, it said 12 but I think it was more like 20. When they came out it was obvious that I’d overstuffed the muffin cups.
I had enough left to make another batch, though, and this time I used a spoon to put the cream cheese batter in and pushed some of the batter in by hand. They looked better.
A few of them even looked almost good.
And everyone loved them. Antonia got the last two from the batch that went to work with me, and Dave and Nathaniel get the rest. Juliet will opt out because of the chocolate. I like them but I wanted them to look prettier. Pretty, schmetty, though, they got raves. They’re small decadent indulgent bites of brownie and cheesecake, what’s not to rave about?
CHEESECAKE BROWNIE BITES RECIPE
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