Recipe Hacks - Salted Caramel Chocolate Brownie

The cooking world abounds with recipe hacks. In fact most convenience foodsand products are a recipe hack. The recipe hack can be more generally described as a product that simplifies or reduces the cooking time of a recipe, think curry pastes, pasta/simmer sauces, frozen pastry. I have been reading and cooking from  Bravetart by Stella Parks recently, a most excellent book for those who enjoy both baking and a bit of food history. The recipes are all about classic/iconic American treats, how to reproduce them and many ways to vary the recipe.  One of sections features Brownies and a very interesting variation called Milky Swirl. Homemade condensed milk is used to create the milky swirl in the chocolate batter. Most people I know would not be up for making their own condensed milk and this got me to thinking about how I could hack or adapt the recipe something that I do often as you can see in this  previous post . My basic brownie recipe is simpler than the one in the book so I used it as the base. My first trial used commercial condensed milk, unfortuately the condensed milk sank to the bottom. It was delicious but there was no swirl. No complaints from the testing panel.

The next trial used Top n Fill a caramel version of condensed milk. The caramel swirled nicely over the top but disappeared during baking and had some pleasing blobs of caramel studded throughout the brownie. Still no complaints and happily consumed. I have been playing around with various versions of this recipe and have finally settled on this one as it is easiest to mix up and uses commercial caramel condensed milk.

Dense and fudgy in texture with little pockets of caramel and thin layer of baked on salted caramel topping.

I use my favourite brownie recipe and reduce the sugar. It is important to warm the condensed milk slightly so that it will spread. I put it into a Pyrex / microwave safe jug and heat in ten second increments until just warm enough to mix easily. Add some salt flakes - to your taste and then incorporate into the Brownie.

Spoon the Brownie mixture into the tin. Create little wells or holes and fill with a heaped teaspoon of the salted caramel.

Spread the remaining caramel over the top and then feather or run a skewer through the mixture in opposite directions to cut a little more caramel into the mixture. Take care not to tear the paper lining the tray.