Sweet Tooth Factory: Sometimes Less Is S’More

Brownie Basics

Uhh… words don’t really do it justice. Here’s a picture of what I bought.

Brownie Backstory

Huh.

Alright, so let’s try to go through this logically. This is the fourth of (at time of writing) five places at the Southbank Food Market which sell brownies, and this is the one that wasn’t there last week when I went looking for it. It’s called Sweet Tooth Factory, and it seems that it’s based out of an actual bakery in Battersea. They have this huge range of cakes and baked goods on offer at the stall, including (by my count) five different types of brownie. I decided to go for… the most interesting one.

S’mores are an American thing, where you melt marshmallow and chocolate between two biscuits, generally over an actual open fire? I guess that’s a sufficiently complicated thing that it makes sense for a “s’more brownie” to not just be s’mores in/on a brownie. I might pedantically suggest that this thing is a “brownie s’more” but whatevs, I blogged about a milkshake not that long ago so I’m not really gonna get on a moral high horse about this. It’s just worth pointing out that I’m aware this is a ‘brownie’ where the brownie is in the minority by volume.

I poked the top a few times experimentally before eating it. If this is a s’more, it should be marshmallow, right? I… think it’s actually meringue? I can’t decide if I reckon this is an improvement or not. Marshmallow is not exactly my favorite thing. The texture’s too gummy for my tastes and I’m not that into things that taste of nothing more complicated than “sweet”. Maybe meringue is better? Let’s find out what I think of the whole thing.

Brownie Points

Taste: The brownie layer tastes pretty good, once you get down to it. The first sensation in every bite is the sickly-sweet marshmallow/meringue top layer, and then as I chew the brownie layer eventually dominates the flavour and I like it correspondingly more. I don’t think the two tastes work very well together if I’m honest. It’s an interesting idea but it is a bit like a good brownie that’s been… ruined. 5/10

Texture: Three textures: the soft top, the brownie, and the biscuit-oat base layer. The latter two are both good: the brownie’s soft and fudgy and the biscuit adds a good contrast. The meringue’s not as good, it seems too liquid in some places and too rubbery in others, but I do kind of like the different tiers of softness as you go down through the slice. 7/10

Presentation: It does look incredible to be fair. I wonder if it was baked with the top layer present, or if the scorching was added by painstaking hand afterwards? The top layer also made it kind of hard to carry around in the bag it was given to me in, at least not without damaging it. 4/5

Value: At £3, I feel like it’s okay value for its size, but is hurt somewhat by the fact that many of its direct competitors in that market cost less and are better in taste and/or texture. £3 is not an insane amount, though, so I’ll give it a middling value score of 5/10

Fudge Factor: I’m all for bold experiments with ingredients and form when it comes to food, brownies included. The problem is that I don’t think this experiment has worked. The biscuit base and the brownie layer are about as good as they need to be, but something is off about the top layer, and furthermore I’m not convinced that the combination actually works: I think that the combination of meringue/marshmallow (actually, the fact I’m not sure which of those it is on top is itself a problem) with brownie gives you something that’s less than the sum of its parts. It was also hard to eat with my hands because of the soft top layer. To reward innovation, even if it’s in a misguided direction, I’ll give 1/5

Total Score: 22

Should I Buy And Eat This Brownie?

Lemme lay it down for you: this is the first thing I’ve tried from Sweet Tooth Factory, and I bought it because it looked wacky and interesting and I had to try it. The actual brownie part of this brownie is good enough that I feel confident that the rest of their brownies will be better than this one was. In conclusion… don’t buy and eat this brownie, but I would imagine that you probably should buy and eat some of the other brownies on offer at Sweet Tooth Factory. Hopefully in a few weeks I’ll be able to say for certain!

Closing Thought

Chocofruit didn’t have any brownies with them today! Could this be… the power I have?