T'was a dark and stormy brownie...

The weather lately has all-out sucked. Lots of dark gray clouds, very little sun... it's really what I had imagined more of London's winter to be like. April was soooooo beautiful - warm, sunny days and nights where all you'd need is a light sweater, great for taking walks, etc. But now it's May, and the April showers showed up a bit behind schedule.

So one particularly bleak day last weekend, I declared it to be a Baking Day, and started crawling through food blogs to see what's happening on the interweb. From Tastespotting, one of my new favorite sites, I noticed a particularly chocolatey brownie recipe. They called for 3/4 of a pound (!!!) of dark chocolate, so it had something going for it straight off the mark. They also topped the brownies with a layer of chocolate ganache, and sprinkled them with a bit of French sea salt. The salt may sound a bit weird, but really all baked goods tend to contain some salt. Bread contains salt to keep the yeast from growing insanely (yeast dies when it comes in contact with salt), and sweet baked goods contain salt to help them taste more like what they're supposed to taste like... it enhances the flavor of things like caramel and chocolate nicely.

The resulting brownies were incredibly dense but really moist, and the chocolate ganache (a mixture of cream & dark chocolate) added nice creaminess without being overly sweet. A few people noticed the salt (most didn't), and really liked the addition.

I've taken the liberty of quoting a couple of coworkers for their reviews:
- Jim: (nods head, points at brownies, gives thumbs up, eats a second)
- LiWei: (squeaked with glee)
- Leslie: (rubs hands together in Evil Professor-ish manner) "oooOOooOooooo..."
- Amy: (As Amy is on a trip to CA & NY, sadly she didn't get one, but she has told me about all of the fabulous food she's eaten at the Mountain View office during her visit, including the fresh blueberry waffles for breakfast, so really I consider myself just evening out the score.)