Birthday Brownies: The Sequel

Ok two things first:
1) Evidently I lied in the last post about starting to do work, because I've done none since I wrote that and here I am again
2) I just enabled targeted advertising on this site and the first ad I saw was.. Magnum ice cream! One of my all time favorite things in the world. Man these google people are good.

Alright, now back to the brownies.

Well all, just as I share my culinary triumphs with you, I must also share my non-triumphs (let's not use the word failures). The brownies were sub-par. Why, you might ask? Well, I kind of didn't follow the recipe. As you may recall it asks for ChocoBake or, in a pinch, cocoa powder. Evidently I was in more than a pinch because I used solid baking chocolate. Perhaps not enough? Perhaps at the wrong temperature? All I know is something went awry. The brownies were not as moist or chocolaty as they should have been. They were more like cake. Pretty good cake, but not what expected. I also place some of the blame on the hardware (evidently living in a prewar building means getting stuck with a prewar oven). Whatever, I stand by the recipe, and I just ordered a ton of ChocoBake from Amazon.

On to the decorating. I wanted to draw something with candles (since it was Akshaya's Bday, after all) but figured drawing a cake on brownies would be kind of weird (like a dessert turducken). For reasons unbenownst to me, I decided that I should draw a chandelier. So here's what I did.


First, I let the brownies cool to room temperature, and then drew a chandelier on a piece of computer paper. Actually I drew half of a chandelier, folded the piece of paper in half, held it up to the window, and traced the other half to make sure it was symmetrical.

Here's my drawing.

I cut out a few pieces of the sketch so I could use it as a stencil and block out the design. In retrospect, I wish I had done more of this and/or marked more spots with toothpicks because it was hard to reconstruct the design.

I made a simple buttercream frosting, dyed some of it yellow and some blue, and used a size 4 pastry bag tip to draw on the chandelier. The beads are the same candy pearls I used on the buttercup bundt cakes from last week. For the writing and the border I used a size 16 pastry tip.

Voila! Not too bad. Next time I will do more tracing and less eyeballing to avoid some of the squiggliness. ( And maybe I'll spend more than 20 seconds on the text to avoid the kindergarten-macaroni-collage look.)

Happy Birthday AK! xox