Meh: A Year in Various Desserts

"Meh" is a little harsh maybe, but nicely done desserts with flaws in taste or ugly desserts with great taste are not what I'd consider a success. What these things all have in common is that I made them at the beginning of my baking career and they need to be improved. Fortunately they were decent recipes at heart, so after everything I've learned it would probably be easy to make them perfectly the second time around.

These two desserts I kind of impressed myself with. It was before I'd learned how to use my microwave's oven feature, so I made them in a tiny little open flame fish grill. Chocolate bread pudding with icing and chocolate sauce on the left. Iced banana bread on the right. I honestly can't remember where I got the recipes. The bread pudding was pretty good and the banana bread was all right, but they were not that attractive and that's precisely why I'm including them in the blog. Also when your banana bread is a little gray, it is not appealing. These products embody my mantra: "If it looks like crap, it needs to taste fantastic...but then you've gotta up your game because there's no excuse for it to look like crap to begin with." Apparently I need a catchier mantra.What these sweets need is a gimmick. 

These brownies, however, aren't doing so bad for their gimmick! Brownies with chocolate frosting and chocolate covered cherries. This was part of my "how the hell do you make good chocolate frosting" phase and they came right before the chocolate frosted cakes in the "Success: A Year of Cakes" post. They were pretty good, though the frosting was more chocolate than butter cream, and the brownies were very cake-like and a little dry. I think next time I would put sour cream or something in it and make it super fudgey. Brownies, in my opinion should be really moist and gooey. But considering it was my first attempt at brownies from scratch and they didn't taste like one's first brownies from scratch, it's still a win. I believe I used this recipe but with cocoa substituted for the baking chocolate and a combination of white and brown sugars. I suspect baking chocolate would've made it less dry as well.



Finally, these suckers I made from a mix (lol "suckers," I made a pun!), but I'm including them because they were made in my adorable little mini madeleine pans. Of course, they pans are a bitch to clean, but they're so cute I'll probably bring them back to America with me. I torted them and put a layer of Nutella and a thin layer of hardened chocolate in between to give it some texture. They came out a little crumbly, so I think a denser cake would do better in this mold next time.