Caramel Brownies

I almost forgot to blog about these brownies.  I made them a few weekends ago.  I had couple (or more!) the day I made them, wasn't real impressed (not that I stopped eat them - it was chocolate after all!) and then stuck the rest in the freezer.  They stayed in the freezer for a while because I had a couple of buckets of treats to get rid of at work and didn't want to overwhelm my audience. 

I found them on Sunday and ate one right out of the freezer (again who can resist chocolate!).  To my surprise it was super, super yummy!  So I dug out my pictures so I could post about them. 

The recipe, which I got from Annies-eats.com calls for bittersweet chocolate.  I had bought this Ghirardelli chocolate for something else (my tunnel of fudge cake) and promptly forgot what I bought it for. 

So when I was looking at all my saved recipes for one to try that weekend I figured this would be a great way to use up this "Intense Dark" Chocolate.  It turns out it was a good mistake.  This brownie recipe is super rich and sweet.  I think you need the more bitter chocolate in this recipe where I think it wouldn't have been as good in my cake. 

The brownie batter is really simple (melted butter & chocolate, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour & salt) but it seems like it has a lot more butter than it needs.  After I had mixed the whole thing up it was still really shiny and actually had some free standing liquid.  

I dumped out half of the batter

(That looks like half right?) into a foil lined 13x9" pan and baked it for 20 minutes. 

While it cooled for 20 minutes I made the caramel.  I used these wonderful Caramel bits - no unwrapping!!  I love them and they melt so smooth. 

Once the caramel was all melted...

I dumped it over the bottom layer of brownie.

Then comes the tricky part...  Getting the rest of the batter to cover the caramel.  I actually did really well at spreading the batter across the top by spooning it out over the caramel,  see picture below.

So it just took a little nudging of the thicker sections to get full coverage.  I was glad I took the time to distributed it pretty evenly from the start because the brownie batter is thick and didn't spread very evenly.  

Last step... Top the whole thing with chocolate chips.  

Twenty minutes later...

I let them cool for awhile on the counter and then tried to cut myself a piece...

It didn't work very well as you can see above.  So waited until the next day to cut anymore pieces.  Now at least it stayed in a square.  But you can see the caramel is still oozing.  Like I said they were okay warm - and maybe if I was a bigger caramel fan I would have really liked them with the loose caramel.  

But to me the firm/frozen caramel was much better and gave a nice chewy contrast to the soft, rich brownie.  If you make these try them room temperature and frozen and let me know which you like better!