It was my wife who introduced me to the brownie called "cherry walnut fudge." Only one bakeshop makes it in the Philippines, as far as we know -- Becky's Kitchen. We have been living out of the country since 2006 so we never had this brownies in a long, long time.
I could not find a recipe for a cherry walnut fudge brownies on the internet, so I used my favorite brownie mix and I added maraschino cherries and walnuts. Simple? Not quite.
What we loved about the Becky's Kitchen brownies was its fudge-like texture and its moistness. The problem was my brownie mix was the basic type, not the kind that says on the label it's fudge-like, chewy, or moist. I've been using the brownie mix for quite some time now and I already tried varying the amounts of the other ingredients -- eggs, butter, vegetable oil, dark chocolate, cocoa powder -- to obtain the consistency and taste that I wanted. This piece written by Shirley Corriher for the American Chemical Society about the science behind brownies guided me in my experiments. Corriher is a biochemist and she wrote some cookbooks.
"For fudgy brownie use less flour," advises Corriher. My biggest challenge was how to properly adjust the amount of fats relative to the flour. The brownie mix I'm using does not specify how much flour it actually has on its label. I had to make brownies with different fat contents. It was all worth the effort and nothing was ever wasted. It didn't matter what proportion I used. My son would still eat the finished product, whether it turned out to be fudge-like or cake-like.
After getting the right proportion of ingredients, I decided it was time to finally make a version of Becky's Kitchen's brownies. My wife and I thought that what I came up with was close enough to the original, both in terms of taste and texture. But I know I must remind myself that we have not eaten the Becky's Kitchen version for several years now so the comparison we made might not be valid.
We enjoyed eating the brownies nonetheless.
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