Brownie Fail x2

I love to bake. I love sharing my baking successes on this blog - but I also want this blog to show the other sides of my life. Here is one of my baking failures.

This is a little story about how my wonderful husband's brownie craving turned into a kitchen disaster twice in the same week.

Garrett was really craving brownies last week. He mentioned wanting some a couple days in a row, so I offered to make him a batch. I remembered that my mom makes some really delicious chocolate caramel brownies, so I decided to look a similar recipe up online. During our hunt for a simple caramel brownie recipe, we found a recipe for Salted Caramel Bacon Brownies and thought we should give them a try. To make the caramel, the recipe had you melt 1/2 a cup of sugar and then add cream and bacon grease to the melted sugar. The recipe specifically said that the mixture should be a nice auburn color. Well it was that color, for about 1 second, and suddenly the mixture was black and my kitchen was filled with smoke.
We opened the back door and two flies found their way inside our house, and 5 days later one of them is still in our kitchen. I decided that even though the mixture was burned, that there would be enough sugar in the brownies to cover up the burned taste. It still tasted mostly like caramel, and just a little bit like it was burned. The brownie batter was DELICIOUS. So I swirled the brownie batter an the slightly burned caramel together in a baking pan an popped it in the oven. Turns out that when you cook something that is already a little bit burned, it becomes even more burned! I don't know why this didn't occur to me before putting the brownies in the oven. Needless to say, the brownies were disgusting.

Try number 2. I decided to make the same brownies, but leave out the bacon. I did not burn the sugar, however I did forget to add cream to the melted sugar (a mistake I didn't realize until writing this post and thinking about why this attempt failed). While I was mixing the brownie batter, the melted sugar solidified and was hard as a rock. So I remelted and swirled together with the brownie batter. While the brownies were in the oven, the melted sugar caramel basically turned into shards of sugar glass. They didn't taste too bad, but you just had to be really careful eating them so that you didn't cut your mouth up. Garrett and Devin both ate one and declared them "good if you know what to expect and don't mind a little crunch." Well, I do mind a little crunch, especially in caramel brownies!!

That said, it looks like I'm going to buy a box mix for attempt #3. Can't screw those up, right?!