Pages

Thursday, February 6, 2014

Stove-top Baking: Brownies!

I know, you all think this is probably just a missions blog, but it's our "life" blog too. So you have to suffer through my random cooking experiments, squatty-potty stories and comments on parenthood. 

Now that you've been forewarned, we can continue!

Did you know you can bake on your stove-top? No? 
Yeah, neither did I. I read a blog about it, so I figured I would try it. I was craving chocolate and I just happened to have one of those terribly bad for you but taste so delicious boxes of brownies in the pantry.

It was all very simple. Get a pot with a lid big enough to put a cake pan in. I had to try three pots to get the cake pan to fit. Preheat the pot (no lid or anything on it) for 5 mins on HIGH while you are mixing up the batter. The "oven" pot may start to smoke during this, so turn the heat down just slightly until the major burning goes away. If there is any oil or residue on the "oven" pot it will burn off and be a bit smelly.

Fill the cake pan with your batter. 


Next place some sort of spacer between the "oven" pan and the cake pan. This could be flat rocks, or some other spacer object. I pulled out the pot holder from my pressure cooker and placed it in the middle of my stove-top "oven" pot. 

Next place your cake pan on the spacer...VERY CAREFULLY! I ended up using tongues because the pot is very hot and the space wasn't big enough for my fingers. Cover with a lid.


The blog I read was rather vague about the heat setting, other than to turn it way down. So I turned it down to simmer level (about a 2 on my stove). After 30 minutes it was cooked on the outside but the middle was rather soggy. Definitely not brownies. Alas, I'm not one to throw in the towel in the kitchen,  I turned the heat up to about med-low (4 on my stove) and put the timer on for another 7 minutes. About 6 minutes in, I heard sizzling sounds and I thought maybe the batter had somehow boiled over. I was happily surprised to find that it was just condensation forming on the lid dripping onto the "oven". My brownies, however, were cooked through! 


The brownies easily popped out of the pan. It didn't have quite the same taste as oven baked, but I didn't care...it was CHOCOLATE after all! 


 Here it is - a stove-top baked brownie! I enjoyed this baby while watching Call the Midwife Christmas Special that I missed a few weeks back. Not a bad way to spend the evening! 

PS I apologize for my terrible food photography. My iPhone photography skills leave a lot to be desired. But trust me, I'll be using this method in the summer when it's hotter than hades in my house! Enjoy!


No comments:

Post a Comment