Overall Rating:

1 out of 5

What a wretched recipe!!, November 19, 2009
By OPromise

"I tried this recipe despite my reservations at the initial reading. I was looking for a decent, simple carob brownie recipe and came across this. It looked interesting because of the peanut butter. But it had several problems.

1. The recipe states that 4 eggs are needed but the follow up doesn't address what one should DO with the eggs. I assumed that they would go with the wet ingredients and beat them in with the melted peanut butter/butter.

2. There are a LOT of dry ingredients. 2 cups of sugar, 2 cups of flour, 3/4 cup of carob powder. Combine that with 1.5 cups of wet ingredients. I understand that bananas should provide some moisture, but seriously--not that much.

3. Carob is heavy. Mix it with flour and an inadequate amount of moisture and you end up with the batter looking like biscuit dough at half the dry ingredients.

4. Carob is also a bit less sweet than, say, ground up aspirin. I understand this. It's the reason most recipes call for an astounding 1 cup of honey. BUT TWO CUPS OF SUGAR!!!??? Yikes!! White, granulated sugar no less--not helping with the whole mismatched wet/dry ratio.

Instead of just griping, though, I tried this with a few modifications. They were still horrible, dense, dry brownies...but I'm hopeful that with a bit of tweaking I will eventually redeem this recipe. Here are some initial changes I made:

1. About the time my batter started cleaning the side of the bowl I started adding half and half. I didn't have milk so I made do. I think I ended up with 3/4 to 1 cup just to make the batter brownie like.

2. Just leave the bananas out. They just add to the overall gluey mess you end up glopping in the pans.

3. I had to stop at one cup of sugar--just couldn't add two.

4. Added a teaspoon of vanilla extract to the melted butter/peanut butter mixture.

Suggestions:

1. Add applesauce (1 cup for this probably) like EVERY OTHER CAROB RECIPE ON EARTH calls for!! Hellooooo moisture!!

Cheers!"