brownie-gasm

Sometimes you just need a brownie. Or three. Yesterday was a must-have-brownie day for me. Rather than indulge my craving with a crappy store-bought brownie full of gluten and high fructose corn syrup and who knows what else, I picked up a box of King Arthur Flour's gluten-free brownie mix. I had been meaning to give the mix a try and maybe write up a review on it, so this seemed the perfect excuse. Plus, brownies!

The King Arthur mix is super easy to make - all you need are two eggs, two tablespoons of water and half a cup of melted butter or oil. I followed the directions to a T, except I added one very important step: when it came time to spread the batter in the greased baking pan, I only spread half the batter in, then topped the batter with spoonfuls of organic chunky-style peanut butter. I smoothed the peanut butter out a little bit but not enough to mix it into the brownie batter, then I spooned the remaining batter over the top and smoothed that out gently as well. After about 38 minutes of baking and another hour of not-so-patient waiting for the brownies to cool, I was rewarded with these babies:

Get into mah mouf, brownies!

They. Were so. Freaking. Good. They came out dense and fudge-y, and the edges...oh god, the edges. I am a huge fan of the corners and edge pieces of brownies because I love that chewy, slightly crisp quality that they get. This mix made brownies with seriously THE BEST corner pieces I've ever had - so chewy without being hard or crusty at all. Utterly delicious.

In addition to being gluten-free and incredibly easy to mix up, the King Arthur Flour mix doesn't contain any crazy ingredients. It's just sugar, their specialty flour mix (which is a mixture of rice flour and tapioca starch), cocoa, baking powder, vanilla and salt. That's it. I can't tell you how much I appreciate that. In this day and age of fat-free, sugar-free chemical shit-storms of fake food, it's SO nice to turn a box over and see a really short and straight-forward, all-natural ingredient list.

The mix retails for $6.95 on the King Arthur Flour website, and I call that an excellent value. I certainly couldn't concoct my own gluten-free brownies from ingredients at home for $6.95, and I doubt you could find a bakery that would sell you a dozen gluten-free brownies of comparable quality for that cheap, either.

So, as you could likely tell from the post title alone, I will definitely be buying this mix again. I want to try a batch with almond butter filling instead of peanut butter, and maybe one with some kind of minty filling for my mint-obsessed husband. The possibilities are endless!