The Fighting 44s

So way back in February I sort of became obsessed with making chewy bar type desserts. Two of my favorite chewy bars are brownies and blondies. Both are made from similar ingredients and give you an end product with similar textures so I figured they’d probably be fine if you combined them together into one very high on the glycemic index treat.

It’s probably obvious why they’re called dirty gooks. They are yellow and brown and swirly. I suppose you could also call them poo-pees, or blasians, but I just wanted an excuse to name a dessert after a racial expletive. It’s a three-part recipe. You’ll need to make two different batters and then combine them in one pan. The dirty part of the recipe is slightly more finicky than the gook part of the recipe. You see how the bar is sort of shiny? That has to do with the temperature of your sugar and butter together in the brownie batter. You don’t want to walk away from the stove once you’ve combined the sugar and the butter together.

This is what you’ll need:

First for the dirty part of the recipe:

• 3/4 stick of butter or 3 oz
• 1 c white sugar or 7 oz
• 1/2 c dutch process cocoa or 1.5 oz (I think if you just have regular cocoa that’s fine too)
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/4 tsp baking powder
• 1/2 Tb vanilla extract
• 1 1/2 eggs (I know this sounds annoying, all you need to do is break a 2nd egg, whisk it up, and just estimate half, use the other half to feed your hedgehog or dog or something)
• 1/2 c flour or 2.25 oz

The gook part was lifted and halved from here:

• 3/4 stick of butter, or 3 oz
• 3/4 c of all purpose flour, or 3.75 oz
• 1/2 tsp baking powder
• 1/4 tsp salt
• 3/4 c of brown sugar (I just used one kind, either dark or light works fine)
• 1 large egg
• 3/4 tsp vanilla extract
• 1/4 c milk chocolate chips
• 1/4 c white chocolate chips
• 1/4 c pecans

Let’s begin with the dirty part of the recipe since it takes longer:

Melt butter over low heat. Turn your heat up to medium and add your sugar stir to combine. Now this part requires a little bit of babysitting. Let sit on med heat, stirring occasionally until it’s nearly bubbling, but you definitely don’t want it to bubble and boil. If you’re a dork like me and own a cooking thermometer, you’ll want the mixture between 110-120F. Take it off the heat and let it sit for ~10 minutes to cool.

Add your cocoa powder, salt, baking powder and vanilla extract.

Then add your 1.5 eggs and stir to combine.

Next stir in your flour until your mixture is smooth.

Now the gook part of the recipe:

Melt the butter in a medium saucepan and then remove from the heat. Add brown sugar and stir until dissolved. Let the pot cool for ~10 minutes.

Add egg, vanilla extract, and salt. Stir till smooth.

Add flour and baking powder. Stir until nearly combined.

Add chips and nuts. Stir until fully incorporated.

Now to bring the dirty gookiness together:

Preheat your oven to 340 degrees F or 170 C. You can use either a square baking pan, or even a 9×13 inch cake pan, but you’ll end up with thinner bars that’ll take less time to cook. I used a 9×9 removable bottom baking pan. Be sure to grease the pan, then cover that in parchment paper, and then grease the parchment paper again. If you don’t have parchment you can definitely get away with using foil.

This part is pretty much up to you, if you want to put the brownie part on the bottom, or the blondie part on the bottom it doesn’t matter. You can even combine them on the bottom layer. I just happened to use my gooks as a base. Don’t use all of it for the bottom layer though, save a couple of scoops to put on top for swirling.

Now layer with your brownie batter.

Then top with more gook. Kind of looks like it’s smirking.

Take a butter knife and give your batter a good swirling. It’s not difficult, just got back and forth up and down, then back and forth left and right.

Bake for 35-40 minutes. Check on it at ~30 minutes for doneness, especially if you’re using a bigger pan. Let cool to room temperature before serving.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 4th, 2008 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Blog, Ellen's Cooking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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