Around St. Patrick's Day I got this bright idea to make a Guinness themed meal. Normally I am not a fan of the dry Irish stout but my fiancee, T, happens to LOVE it. All year round, that is one of his favorite things to drink. In order to make this happen, I first needed to decide what I was going to make. After browsing on Pinterest for about 30 minutes I decided I was going to attempt two things.
First - Steak & Guinness Pie
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Second - Double Chocolate Guinness Brownies
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With the first recipe I ended up going with lean ground beef as we were fresh out of steak. However, I followed the rest of the recipe word for word. Whenever I am trying a new dish I try to follow everything to make sure I don't have a flop. I am a bit stronger in the cooking side of things so I wasn't too scared to try the ground beef. This turned out AMAZING. I have approval from T to make this recipe any time I like. My pie didn't turn out EXACTLY like the picture above. The only thing I would have done is thickened up the sauce as it was a bit watery and made the bottom pie crust a little wet. This recipe was before I ever thought of blogging about it so I didn't take a picture unfortunately. I gave it 5/5 though.
The second recipe I was so excited to try because I am a huge chocolate fan. I don't like it in HUGE amounts, but every now and then it does well for my sweet tooth. I will warn in advance, I am NOT a baker. I have now started to attempt baking recipes since joining Pinterest but normally I would run in the opposite direction. The reason why I stress I am not a baker? Well when this recipe called for 1/4 cup of baking powder, I didn't think anything of it.
I had this gut feeling of "Isn't this a bit much?"but instantly shrugged it off because the pictures posted on the website looked so yummy and I couldn't wait to try them. I followed the recipe step by step, placed it into the oven and waited for the magic to happen. Magic was definitely one word for it. About 10 minutes into the baking of the brownies, I decided to peak in on my masterpiece to find a molten of chocolate lava exploding into my clean oven. I pulled it out of the oven and attempted transferring the chocolatey mess into another dish. I didn't want to give up on my chocolate brownies, not yet. Why? Because that picture showed me that they weren't supposed to turn out like that. Needless to say, the end result was a messy oven and a big pile of chocolate crap with messy dishes. When T came home and saw my "brownies" he asked what had happened. I explained the situation, showed him the recipe and he laughed. With T being the baker out of our relationship, he knew that 1/4 cup was too much for any baking recipe he had ever seen involving brownies. My end score with this? 1/5. There was a few points lost on the fact I had the clean caked brownie out of my oven and another point lost for careless posting of measurements. Again, pictures of this disaster were never taken, because I never thought to post my baking failure for the world to see. Take my word for it though, it was a big, chocolate mess. I since renamed it, Chocopolypse 2012. If you try this recipe and have a different outcome, let me know if you did anything differently.
Happy Cooking!
Much Love,
K
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