A year of Dorie

I've always been a rule-follower.  It often drives me crazy when others don't follow rules, especially traffic laws.  =)  I joke about Brianna's "hall monitor" attitude, but much as it pains me to admit it, she gets it from me. =)  And then there's the fact that I'm also a bit of an over-achiever.  I tend to go above and beyond what I need to do, which sometimes causes me to get stressed out over things more than necessary.

Tuesdays with Dorie is a good case in point.  The point of the group is to bake on a weekly basis, working through the recipes in the fabulous Baking From My Home to Yours.  But because life sometimes gets in the way, Laurie said that we have to participate a minimum of two weeks out of four. I tend to feel guilty, though, when I miss a week, even if life is crazy or I really don't like what we're making. 

This week was more the former than the latter.  Shari of Whisk: A Food Blog chose Floating Islands for this week's recipe.  I had a busy week and weekend because of work, and by the time Sunday got here, I just didn't feel motivated to make the recipe.  Eggy and custardy things usually aren't that high on my list either, which didn't help.  I felt bad about it, but by Sunday night, I decided that I wasn't going to participate this week.  

But then on Monday, I realized that this week is the anniversary of when I joined the group.  My first recipe was the Brown Sugar-Apple Cheesecake.  In 52 weeks, I've only missed 5 recipes.  Not bad!  =)  And those were primarily because one of the main ingredients (e.g. coconut or blueberries) was something I really dislike, and I couldn't figure out a way to change up the recipe without completely re-writing it.  I still didn't feel like making meringues, but I did want to bake something.

So I turned to the list of recipes that were made before I joined TWD.  There aren't all that many, but one of them caught my eye.  I decided to make the Quintuple Chocolate Brownies.  Now when it comes to baking, my rule-following tendencies are often at war with my let's-see-what-will-happen-if-I-do-this experimental scientist tendencies. =)  So I did change a couple things in the recipe.  First, my chocolate choices.  I mostly use El Rey chocolate discs for baking, since I can buy them in bulk.  I used Gran Saman (70%) bittersweet, Caoba (41%) milk chocolate, and Icoa white chocolate, along with some Nestlé unsweetened and Scharffen Berger cocoa powder.  For the nuts I used toasted pecans.  Since I'm not that big a fan of white chocolate, I didn't actually make the glaze; I just chopped up some white chocolate and stirred it into the batter in place of some of the milk chocolate.

The verdict?  Pretty good, but not my favorite brownie recipe.  I'm not sure if I overbaked them (though I only baked them 30 minutes rather than 35), but they seemed sort of dry in texture, though very chocolatey.  I like the idea of the different types of chocolate chunks, though, so I may add them to a brownie recipe that I like better.  I'd probably skip the nuts though--I'm okay with them in cookies, but don't really like the texture of them in brownies that much.

Be sure to head over to the blogroll to see how everyone else did with the Floating Islands.  You can get the recipe here on Shari's blog.  (I do want to make them eventually!)  And the recipe for the brownies can be found on Laurie's blog.