Guilty Bakery: Needs Must When The Brownie Drives

Brownie Basics

Since visiting coffee shops is probably out for the foreseeable future, I picked up some brownies during my desperate foraging in Waitrose.

Brownie Backstory

BASED ON A TRUE STORY

BUYING GUILTY BROWNIES

INT. WAITROSE – EVENING

Our hero BROWNIE BLOGGER enters. He is tired from walking around supermarkets looking for now-rare necessities like BREAD, PASTA and COFFEE.

BROWNIE BLOGGER
Man, it’s all gone!

We pan across a series of empty shelves in the supermarket. The last pan ends on BROWNIE BLOGGER listlessly browsing the BAKERY.

BROWNIE BLOGGER
Ooh, look!

Close-up on a box of GUILTY BAKERY – 2 ESPRESSO BELGIAN CHOCOLATE BROWNIES.

BROWNIE BLOGGER (offscreen)
I suppose it’s been a while since I reviewed a new brownie, and they’re likely to be harder to find soon.

SUPER: “TWO DAYS BEFORE NATIONAL QUARANTINE LOCKDOWN”

BROWNIE BLOGGER
Rich gooey brownie with a hint of coffee, topped with an espresso fudge glaze! Well, how could I possibly resist that?

The BROWNIES go in the SHOPPING BASKET. We zoom in through the box and see that the BROWNIES are not, in fact, rich and gooey, but instead look a little bit like a dry piece of chocolate cake with a vaguely fudgy topping. We zoom back out and watch BROWNIE BLOGGER walking away, still searching in vain for coffee.

Brownie Points

Taste: I really liked the taste of these. They reminded me of the time that I put waaaay too much espresso powder in some homemade brownies and accidentally discovered how good coffee-flavoured brownies are (if you like coffee, anyway). They had a good balance of sweet and bitter between the coffee, the fudge topping and the brownie itself. 8/10

Texture: However I cannot say the same for the texture sadly. The topping does some work to improve on this (as it is basically fudge) but the brownie itself, as alluded to, is basically cake. It’s not like…overly dried out or crunchy, and I know that you’ll struggle to get super gooey anything that sits on a shelf in a supermarket, but it’s not as good as I know you can get in supermarket brownies, and the box makes a big deal of the brownie being rich and gooey, which it is very much not. So I’m disinclined to be generous. It’s just okay. 5/10

Presentation: Looks fine. I like the topping, the colour difference between the different layers, and the even look of the top. I don’t like the sides. Like, you know you’re in for a sub-par brownie when you can see air holes in what is supposed to be a thick continuous bar-like object. But the cardboard box is cute and has some nice details on it, so that tips it into the over-fifty-percent club. 3/5

Value: £3.50, again. Waitrose is an expensive supermarket, though, so maybe that should be slightly adjusted down? I find the value section hard sometimes… I think this is a bit overpriced for what I got, on balance. 4/10

Fudge Factor: More brownies should have coffee in them. 1/5

Conclusion: 21

Should I Buy And Eat This Brownie?

I… think these might be worth trying once. If you’re less fussy about your brownie texture than I am, well, first of, you are wrong, but secondly the way that this tastes is very good and therefore you might be even more able to enjoy it than I was. For me, I’ll be searching for coffee brownies more like this. This one, on the other hand, was just okay.

Closing Thought

I’m probably very late to this, but if anyone’s at all interested in films and film-making, and hasn’t already seen Lindsay Ellis’s excellent ‘duology’ on the Hobbit trilogy of films, I’d urge you to check them out. The first one can be found here.