Checkerboard Brownies?

Checkerboard brownies? Even the picture of the brownies in the Bon Appetit book doesn't look "checkerboard" to me. In fact, I think these brownies look more like polka dots brownies to me! LOL!

I'm baking this brownie for our bake-along with Joyce from Kitchen Flavours and Lena from Frozen wings. The original checkerboard brownies recipe from Bon Appetit book uses flaked coconut as its white-coloured layer. The white layer is then spread over a dark coloured chocolate brownies base with tablespoonfuls of the brownies batter dropped over the coconut layer to form a polka-dot-checkerboard design.

Instead of the coconut layer, I'm baking my brownies with a cream cheese layer simply because we don't really like eating flaked coconut in our non-Asian sweets. I'm extremely satisfied with my version of polka-dot-checkerboard brownies and happy that the polka dot design on the brownies looks pretty good. Eating this brownies is like eating a slice of cheesecake and brownies, both at the same time. Nice too that the sweetness, salty and texture of both layers are very well balanced and both layers compliment each other very well.

For our next bake-along, we are baking chicken pie which is to be posted on 26 July 2012. Please bake-along with us! All you need to do is to bake your favourite chicken pie and blog hop with us on this day or within the next 7 days.

Checkerboard Brownies? They look more like polka-dots to me.

Making the brownies batter

Making the cream cheese layer

Making the polka dots design... and bake!

Here are the recipes (with my modification in blue)

Chocolate Brownies Batter from the book, Bon Appetite by Baraba Fairchild
Make 16 square

6 tbsp butter, cut into 6 pieces (90g)
3 1/2 ounce unsweetened chocolate, chopped

(I used 100g semi-sweetened chocolate with 70% cocoa)

2 extra large eggs
1/4 tsp vanilla extract
1 1/2 cup golden brown sugar (reduced to 1 cup)
3/4 cup all purpose flour
1/4 tsp baking powder
1/8 tsp salt

Cream Cheese layer from Australian Good Taste Magazine, Apr 2011 issue

(in 3/4 amount of the original recipe)

250g cream cheese at room temperature
65g (1/4 cup) sour cream
100g (1/2 cup) sugar (reduced to 50g)
1 egg

Chocolate batter

Butter 9 x 9 x 2 inch metal baking pan. Melt butter with chocolate in heavy small saucepan over low heat, stirring until smooth. Pour into medium bowl. Cool to lukewarm. Whisk in eggs and vanilla. Whisk sugar, flour, baking powder and salt in small bowl; sift over chocolate mixture. Mix until blended and smooth.

Spread 1 1 /4 cup chocolate batter in prepared pan. (cover and refrigerate remaining batter). Cover pan tightly with aluminum foil. Refrigerate batter until very firm, about 3 hrs.
(To minimise the storage of the batter in my fridge, I refrigerated my batter all in one container. Even in its firm stage, I was able to spread 2/3 of its amount on the prepared pan as the brownies base)

Cream cheese layer

Beat cream cheese, sour cream and sugar until smooth. Add egg and beat until just combined.

Preheat oven to 350°F (or 160°C fan forced). Spread the cream cheese layer over the chocolate batter. Drop 1 tbsp of chocolate batter over the cream cheese later to form a polka dot checkerboard design. (I rolled tablespoonfuls of chocolate batter into balls and placed them on the cream cheese layer to form a polka dot design) Cover pan tightly with foil.

Bake 45 min. (I baked mine for 30 min) Remove foil and bake until tester inserted in center (with one of dropped chocolate batter) comes out clean, about 40 min. Cool brownies completely in pan on rack.

Cut into squares and serve.

Till now, I'm still not convince that this recipe make a real checkerboard looking brownies and so this is what I have done...

These look more like checkerboard brownies to me :D

And this is how I made this checkerboard brownies...

I made the brownies base using 1/2 of the chocolate batter recipe and bake it in 10cm x 20cm loaf tin. I trimmed off the edges and drew checkerboard designs on the brownies with un-coloured royal icing. (Recipe of royal icing can be found here.)

Now... This is what I called checkerboard brownies...LOL!

Happy Baking
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