Superbowl Brownies! Wrong Ingredient? Help please! :)

[lovessushi]

Later today I plan to make the decadent looking brownies from the Whole Foods website: http://www.wholefoodsmarket.com/recip...

The receipe calls for 6oz. of bittersweet chocolate, but all I have is 6oz. of unsweetened chocolate. Funds are tight and though chocolate can be inexpensive, I'd like to try to use up what we have at home. Is there a way to adjust so I can use the unsweetened chocolate (they are chocolate "disks" from Trader Joe's btw)? Could I add more sugar?

Thanks!!

[cmd]

I think it looks like it will be fine as is with unsweetened chocolate. I make my brownies with unsweetened chocolate, and use 2 c. of sugar for 8 oz of chocolate.

[lovessushi]

Great - thanks!

[lovessushi]

I made them! Added less than 1/8 cup sugar - they came out well overall though not so chocolatey unfortunately...and they're more cakey than fudgy...

Is there a way to tell how the texture will turn out from the ingredients. For example this recipe didn't say if they'd be cakey or fudgy, but I was hoping for fudgy.

The icing is ok...too sweet for my taste but I think the party-goers will enjoy.

[biondanonima]

There's probably a scientific way to know from a recipe whether the end result will be cakey, chewy or fudgy, but in this case I would let experience be my guide. The recipe I love for fudgy brownies is Robert's Absolute Best Brownies from David Lebovitz. That recipe calls for 6T. of butter and 8 oz. of chocolate to 2 eggs and 1/4c. of flour. The recipe you used calls for 8T. butter and 6 oz. of chocolate (so relatively similar amounts to the fudgy recipe), but 3 eggs and a cup of flour - that tells me that they're going to be a lot cakier. The lack of brown sugar means they probably won't be terribly chewy (see the Nick Malgieri Supernatural recipe if you want to see proportions that create a chewy brownie). I really wish authors of brownie recipes would put fudgy, chewy or cakey in their titles, though, so you know what you're going to get!!!!

[lovessushi]

Thanks for the tips - very good to know. I'll try the Robert's recipe next-

And yes, exactly - they need a description in the title!

[biondanonima]

I'm not an expert here, but I think you'll be fine if you slightly increase the amount of sugar you use. You could probably also get away with using a little less chocolate. I'd try adding maybe a quarter cup of sugar to the melted chocolate and butter mixture, and then tasting to see if it tastes like bittersweet chocolate at that point. There's another cup and a half of sugar in the recipe, though, so I doubt they'll be inedibly bitter even if you don't add more sugar.

[lovessushi]

That makes sense - thanks very much!