Slow Cooker Brownies?

When I am offered cookbooks to review (this happens a lot) I generally wonder if they will have anything that I can write about here on The Chocolate Cult. Since this slow cooker (called a crockpot in my childhood) said it had dessert recipes, I thought I'd give it a try. Plus, I do love my crockpot so I was hoping this might have more options than my decades old cookbooks for that appliance. I was sent The Ultimate Slow Cooker Cookbook edited by Linda Larsen for free from the publisher in the hopes that I'd put up a review on Amazon or another online bookselling site; this feature article is a bonus for them.

Under "Chocolate" in the index there are four recipes listed; one is in the third chapter, Appetizers, Snacks, and Drinks, while the other three are Desserts which is chapter eleven. I picked one that I thought my family might enjoy most but which I knew I had all of the ingredients for in my pantries. Dark Chocolate Brownies (pages 278-279) are made entirely from scratch and require a total of seven hours in the crockpot or slow cooker. It called for two types of chocolate -- pieces of chocolate and cocoa powder. The pieces were used as they were but also melted so in total a lot of chocolate was consumed in the recipe and by me and my family.

I'm used to brownie recipes that use oil not butter so the batter was much thicker than I expected it to be. Luckily with my menfolk working from home I had extra hands to help stir the final dry ingredients and the chocolate pieces into the batter before I added them to the crockpot. Bittersweet chocolate was listed in the recipe but I used the 62% Belgian chocolate pieces that I had on hand. Given how much sugar is in this recipe (1 full cup) and the fact that I love darker chocolate, I knew this would be okay to make this one substitution.

The end resulting brownies as you can see don't look like brownies. In part this is because of the directions which end with "Remove the crock insert from the base. Run a knife around the edge of the brownies to loosen them. Let them cool in the crock for about 3 hours. The brownies won't look done at first, but they will be perfect after 3 hours of cooking." According to the side notes on the recipes this is supposed to be 16 servings but how do you serve it? By the spoonful? Do you dump them out then cut them up? This sort of information is needed. Don't forget to remove the sprayed parchment paper you lined the bottom of the crock with so you don't eat it.





I sliced the brownie as best I could so the resulting pieces looked like this below. Inside it looks a lot like a brownie should, don't you think? However, the outside was harder than I really like. The inside did cook all the way through as the recipe promised.

I didn't only try the chocolate recipes but I also made a couple of others. Maple-Glazed Carrots (page 51) turned out delicious. Then to use up some red beans I had on hand, I made Turkey Sausage with Red Beans and Rice (page 158). Finally, I tried out Barbecue Chicken Drumsticks (page 162) though it was more inspirational because I used breasts not drumsticks both because we eat white meat more than dark and I had the breasts on hand. All three of those recipes were okay and didn't seem to be missing any steps so I'm not sure why the brownie recipe didn't give me all the information that I needed.