Smitten Kitchen

There's a blog out there called Smitten Kitchen which is about cooking in a tiny apartment/closet in NYC.  A friend of mine showed me this really nifty recipe they did a while ago called White and Dark Hearted Brownies.  They looked ubber cute and not too complicated.  And to boot, I actually have a small heart cookie cutter that was perfect for this project.  You can use any shape really, but since I had a heart, I used it.

The recipe itself was pretty straight forward.  I bought Ghirardelli brand chocolate bars for the white and semi-sweet chocolates and that seemed to work out well.  I only wish I owned two 8x8 baking pans for this recipe as you have to bake two sets of brownies separately (one white and one dark).  So as an industrial engineer, there was a lot of waste in this process waiting on my other pan to cool enough to get the other brownies out and be cool enough for me to line to pan with tin foil again.

The recipe worked pretty well in the end.  The one piece of advice I would give as a way to enhance the difference of the white and dark brownie is so use clear imitation vanilla in the white brownies to keep them lighter.  I totally forgot and the recipe doesn't hint at it (at least the part I read) so my came out "darker" and don't show as great a contrast as what the photo on the site shows.  They were a big hit for the dinner with friends last night and were a delightful mix of flavors.  I thought it would mostly be different by color, so I was surprised by the difference between the two match ups; eating a dark with a white heart and a white with a dark heat.  If you have one pan, and about 2 hours to kill, I would try it out!