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Vinciane Ngomsi
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- The pan you use for brownies can affect their baking time and what temperature you should choose.
- When making brownies, your eggs should be room temperature.
- Reading your recipe before starting to bake is crucial when baking brownies or any dessert.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
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There are few things that tantalize taste buds quite like a warm, delicious brownie.
Though making them can be simple, some tend to miss a few key components to achieving bakery-style results.
Here are eight mistakes you could be making when baking brownies:
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Not carefully reading your recipe before you start can lead to simple mistakes.
Before you begin to bake, you need to find a recipe that suits your preferred difficulty level and desired brownie consistency.
There are basically two kinds of brownies: cake-like and fudgy. The two typically call for different amounts of chocolate and consequently generate different results.
In addition, read the instructions thoroughly before you get started. Often the ratio of chocolate to butter could be different than you'd expect. Or, the recipe may call for adding melted butter to sugar instead of creaming the butter and sugar together.
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Not adjusting your baking time and temperature to suit your bakeware can lead to overcooked brownies.
There's a reason recipes call for certain types of pans. Even a couple of inches makes a difference, according to the Food Network.
For example, thinner brownies in a longer, flatter pan cook faster than thicker brownies in a smaller, taller pan, so be sure to monitor the cook time and adjust accordingly. Otherwise, you run the risk of having crispier, overcooked desserts.
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You should be paying attention to the kind of chocolate you use since it could affect the taste of your treats.
As with picking the perfect bottle of wine to pair with your meal, you need the best type of chocolate for brownies. After all, chocolate is the focus of the dessert.
According to Craftsy, using baking chocolate gives you the most control over the sweetness of your brownies. But if your recipe calls for sweeter chocolate, such as milk chocolate or semisweet morsels, you'll want to adjust your recipe's sugar levels accordingly.
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Not correctly mixing your ingredients could lead to an uneven batter.
Once you add the five major ingredients (chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs, and flour), you're several strokes and 45 minutes away from heaven.
Unfortunately, if you neglect a key step in the mixing, then that heaven quickly turns into a disaster.
Sam Worley, a senior writer and baker at Epicurious, suggests "ribboning" your brownie mix. That means whipping the eggs and sugar until it becomes a pale yellow hue. After that, follow the normal instructions like folding them into the chocolate mixture and adding the flour.
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Diving into a warmly baked pan of brownies sounds great, but it's important to let them fully cool first.
The chocolate expert Alice Medrich knows a thing or two about baking with the confection — and she has a trick for quickly cooling brownies.
She suggests creating an ice bath with a shallow roasting pan. As soon as the brownie pan emerges from the oven, place it into the cold tin. This will "shock" the brownies, causing them to immediately stop cooking.
Doing this could shorten the time it takes to cool, so you can dive into and enjoy your creation quicker.
The temperature of your eggs makes a difference.
According to America's Test Kitchen, cold eggs don't mix as well as room-temperature ones, and that can affect the final product. So plan on taking your eggs out of the refrigerator at least 30 minutes before you get started.
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For great brownie texture, avoid overmixing your batter.
Overmixing your batter can cause you to incorporate too much air into the brownies, leading to a change in texture. According to Food52, you want to mix any batter until it forms a uniform dough, no more and no less.
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You could burn the bottom of your brownies if you don't line your pan properly.
Monaz Dumasia, a staff writer at Good Housekeeping, suggests that when you bake any cake-like dessert you should insert some grease-proof paper (parchment is your best bet) along the sides of the pan.
The heat will evenly disperse during bake times and you won't have to worry about the crusts being dry and overbaked. Plus your brownies won't stick to the pan.
Read more:
I made brownies using 3 different celebrity-chef recipes, and the best one was also the most fun to bake
10 hacks to make your boxed brownie mix taste gourmet
I made brownies using 3 different celebrity recipes, and the best one contains almost a pound of chocolate
I made Kris Jenner's 'famous brownies' and it became my new go-to recipe
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