Pizza Hut: Somewhat Out Of The Brownie Zone

Brownie Basics

Does Pizza Hut do a brownie? Apparently in Leicester they do!

Brownie Backstory

I am staying in a different hotel this week, having temporarily left the Holiday Inn behind. I’ve been doing this whole travelling-for-work gig for a while now and generally I’ve found that you get a choice of hotels which fall into two categories: hotels which are more centrally located, surrounded by restaurants and bars and the actual town, walkable from the office; and hotels which are often nicer and more luxurious, further out from everything, and giving you a more limited set of options for food or socialising. This week I’m in the Leicester Marriott which definitely belongs in the latter category. It’s got a beautiful fitness suite, a pool and sauna, huge rooms…but Deliveroo doesn’t deliver there, and the restaurant does not do brownies!!

I’ve got a lot of experience with this sort of situation now (even if not in Leicester specifically) and am pretty good at getting creative, and so today (which is Wednesday, although this blog entry’s date doesn’t quite agree) I ordered a takeaway order from the nearby Pizza Hut. Full disclosure: I was swung towards Pizza Hut almost entirely because there was indeed a brownie on their dessert menu. I’ve ordered Pizza Hut before (obviously) and I think Pizza Hut doesn’t really need any explanation or discussion for my audience.

The brownie is new, however. Sometimes when you go a while without ordering from a common takeaway chain (e.g. Pizza Hut, Domino’s) and then you order from somewhere a long way from your usual, and the menu’s all different and you’re not sure if the menu changed in your absence or if it’s just regional variations. And that’s what happened here, where on top of a bunch of different pizza options the desserts were also (by and large) new and exciting! The Pizza Huts in London seem to just have warm cookie dough or Ben & Jerry’s, but this one had an actual brownie (and also cheesecake). So I went out of my way to get pizza for my Wednesday night dinner, and now I can tell you about the brownie I got with it.

Brownie Points

Taste: I’m probably gonna mention this a few times so let’s get this out of the way: the brownie is burnt, at least on the outside. This makes it very hard to have a bite of brownie that doesn’t taste of burn. This is a pity because the insides of the brownie seems pretty good, and every so often there’s a burst of chocolate flavour from a molten chocolate chip. Overall, though, disappointing. 4/10

Texture: The same problem: a gooey and soft interior, a burnt exterior. The ratio of inner/outer volume means that the overall texture works out better than the overall taste, however. 6/10

Presentation: It’s not presented well at all, though I’m not sure what you could really do once you’d chargrilled the brownie like this. It’s sat on its own in a cardboard box. I’m seriously considering making it the first actual brownie to not go into the rotation list for the site header image. 0/5

Value: £5.99, a price which is making me think I really need to recalibrate my scales for the price of restaurant brownies. It’s not a good brownie, but it’s cheaper than I would expect e.g. a warm cookie dough to be, which is about my only point of comparison, so… maybe 4/10

Fudge Factor: The server at Pizza Hut (who was very nice) offered to give me some chocolate sauce to go with this brownie. I declined, figuring it might be good to judge the brownie on its own. But in fairness, if I hadn’t been given the option and chocolate sauce had just been provided by default, I might well have been a point or two more generous up above. So here’s one point to make up for that a bit. It can’t have more, because it was also supposed to come with ice-cream and that wasn’t offered. 1/5

Final Reckoning: 15

Should I Buy And Eat This Brownie?

It is possible, of course, that I was the victim of poor luck, and that Pizza Hut is not in the habit of burning their brownies, in which case this would be a very different proposition. The premise of this blog though relies on the idea that one brownie is a representative sample. I therefore have to assume that all Pizza Hut brownies are burnt, all the time, and therefore cannot recommend that you buy and eat this brownie. Get the cookie dough, maybe. Get the unlimited ice-cream and pretend you’re a child again. Don’t get the brownie.

Closing Thought

What is the difference between warm cookie dough and an underbaked cookie?