TWD: Tribute to Katharine Hepburn Brownies

I'm always excited when the recipe for the week involves chocolate, but when it comes in the form of a brownie - well, then I'm ecstatic!

My thanks go out to Lisa of Surviving Oz, winner of the logo contest and friend of our very own Jaime at Good Eats & Sweet Treats, chose this week's recipe - the Tribute to Katherine Hepburn Brownies. My thanks also especially go out to Dorie for including them in the book in the first place! These are just our kind of brownies - when we want one with stuff in it that is. If I am going for a just chocolate brownies, I will probably still turn to the ones from Baked.

The brownies which Dorie dubbed a tribute to Katharine Hepburn are a version of a recipe she tweaked. I did a Google Search for Katherine Hepburn brownies and got over 9,000 results. Safe to say there are probably many, many versions of the recipe that she was reported to have used out there already. Now this week, there will be several more variations from the other TWD Bakers!

Thank you Katharine for making pants stylish!

Love has nothing to do with what you are expecting to get -
only with what you are expecting to give - which is everything.
Katharine Hepburn

My take on these brownies was to undo a few of Dorie's tweaks - really just personal preference because I'm sure that the addition of the coffee and cinnamon are lovely. When I was making the brownies I left the coffee out because we just don't use it, and the cinnamon because I didn't feel like it. I also realized that I was short on chocolate to put in the brownies so I subbed toffee chips.

So, the low down on my brownies was cocoa, butter, sugar, eggs, a bit of flour, etc. + walnuts, chocolate and toffee chips as my mix-ins. They were a breeze to make and bake for me. I baked them the allotted amount of time with no problems and did bake them in a metal pan that I lined with a parchment sling. I allowed them to cool for probably about 45 minutes before ever trying to cut them. They were nicely fudgey and moist, but not gooey as some others experienced. All in all, I really enjoyed these - especially the ease of making them, and the fact that I wasn't faced with a huge batch - just a little 8x8 square pan's worth - and I know I will be making these again.

After recently reading up on high altitude baking (due to some terribly spreading chocolate chip cookies) I've started to realize that in some situations the recipe and directions may just not coincide with where I/you/we all live and really be no fault of the recipe at all.

Case in point, the recipe for the chocolate chip cookies that basically melted on me, was from the Baked book - assuming that the recipe was created at the Baked shop in the Red Hook area in NY - as well as the main three places I think Dorie probably created and tested her recipes - Paris, New York and Connecticut which are all basically at Sea Level (or less than 100ft elevation) and I am at roughly 4,300ft and it becomes fairly obvious that there can be quite a discrepancy there. It was actually just this past week (yes, after living in Utah for almost 12 years) that in a conversation on Twitter with another local food blogger, Barbara at Barbara Bakes, that she pointed out that perhaps this was my problem. I am a bit chagrined to admit, that because I moved down a couple thousand feet, I just never gave it much thought and haven't adjusted for high altitude in years most of the time. Usually, things have turned out fine, but I think I'm really on to something now about those things that have been going awry on me. Thanks Barbara!

So, I suggest if you have problems, and perhaps like me, thought that maybe you didn't need to worry about high altitude baking (seriously, I thought for a while that for the most part I was in the clear - after all, I used to live at almost 7,000ft - you might want to review this information on the King Arthur Flour website and see if any of it helps when a recipe gives you trouble.