Iron Chef Blogger Challenge: Cream Cheese!

It all started off so wonderfully, with an email yesterday that the secret ingredient this week was cream cheese. "Amazing!", I thought - "I'm already planning to make cream cheese brownies tomorrow!" I've had everything to make cream cheese brownies for a couple of weeks now, and I promised a co-worker that I'd bring them to work on Monday. Everything was coming together, or so I thought...


My first indication that all was not well was that I somehow managed to crack an egg inside the egg carton. I wish I'd taken a picture, it was actually sort of amazing. Looked like I was trying to separate it.

The second problem was that the recipe started on one page in my cookbook, then finished on the back of another page. So I wasn't paying quite as close attention as I should. When I finished the brownie dough, I thought it looked oddly thick. I flipped back, only to discover that I had put an entire extra cup of flour into the batter. I tried adding some more water to thin it out a bit, that was probably a bad move.

Finally, instead of layering my brownie mixture with cream cheese mixture, I accidentally put all the brownie mixture in the pan first, then had to just dump the cream mixture on top of it.

I don't know which part of this catastrophe led to the poor cooking, but something caused my brownies to still be partly liquid after their 25-30 minute cooking time. I ended up cooking them for 20 or 25 more minutes to try to get them cooked in the middle. This resulted in a brownie that is very overcooked on the bottom and a bit too gooey towards the top, as you can see below.

It is mostly edible, but a bit funny tasting. I will definitely not be taking these to work tomorrow. However, I will post the recipe anyway, since if they were made properly, I think they'd be quite delicious. There also 2 new Iron Chef Challenge (1 nutmeg, 1 bacon/mushrooms) that I forgot to link to last time: Banana Bread with Chocolate Chips and Walnuts and Stuffed Mushrooms/BLTs.

Cream Cheese Brownies (Paula Deen)

Brownie Mixture:
2 cups sugar
1 cup vegetable oil
4 eggs
6 tablespoons cocoa
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 1/2 cup self rising flour
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Cream Cheese Mixture:
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, softened
1 8oz package cream cheese, softened
1/2 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 tablespoons all purpose flour
1 cup chopped walnuts or pecans

Preheat oven to 325

For brownie mixture: blend together sugar, oil, eggs, cocoa, and vanilla. add flour; mix. add nuts.

For cream cheese mixture: Cream together butter and cream cheese. Add remaining ingredients; blend well.

Pour 1/2 brownie batter into greased pan. Layer with this cream cheese mix then top with remaining batter. Swirl into brownie batter with knife edge. Bake 25-30 minutes.