The Brownie Diaries | Leah Hyslop
Intro: Welcome to the number one cookbook podcast, Cookery by the Book with Suzy Chase. She's just a home cook in New York City sitting at her dining room table, talking to cookbook authors.
Leah Hyslop: I'm Leah Hyslop. I'm a food writer based in the UK. And my latest book is The Brownie Diaries.
Suzy Chase: When you started thinking about this cookbook, you noticed that you couldn't find a modern brownie cookbook. So there were tray bake cookbooks. Yes. But specifically brownies. No. I would love for you to talk a little bit about that because when I started thinking about it, I couldn't think of one brownie cookbook.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. So, I mean, maybe just, no one else was mad enough to do it. It's probably a truthful answer. But yeah, there'd been a few books that were kind of like brownies and tray bakes, and actually in the US, you might have had some more brownie cookbooks than us in the UK, I imagine. But there was nothing that felt kind of modern or kind of a really fun or personal, which are kind of the cookbooks that I quite like to read, cookbooks that have like little stories in them. So I thought, okay, well maybe that's something I can do.
Suzy Chase: Well, speaking of personal, in this book, you wrote, "Whatever your problem in life, a brownie has a solution." I don't think you can get more personal than that.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. And I truly believe it. I do truly believe that however sad you're feeling or happy your feeling there's a brownie that will fit that situation perfectly. So that was kind of my mission with the book to come up with brownies that would fit all those moods and moments in life.
Suzy Chase: The subtitle is my recipes for happy days, heartbreak, and everything in between. I'd love to kick things off with life scenarios. And you tell me,
Leah Hyslop: Sure.
Suzy Chase: Which brownie is the best for that particular occasion. It feels like a game show. I need some theme music.
Leah Hyslop: It does. I like this. This is great.
Suzy Chase: Okay. So first scenario, I want to invite my date over after dinner.
Leah Hyslop: Oh, okay. Well, there is a perfect one for this, which is my Netflix and chili brownies. You see what I did there? Because I think of brownies, it's very good date food, isn't it? It's kind of indulgent. It's a bit sexy, but it doesn't look like you've made too much effort, which I think is the secret to a first date. Plus you can share them, which I think is also good.
Suzy Chase: Yes.
Leah Hyslop: So these are kind of, a really nice fudgy brownie. My brownies tend to be quite dark and indulgent. That's kind of the end of the brownie axis that I kind of swing to. And then I've kind of got a little bit of ginger, a little bit of chili in there and then popcorn as well. Because if you're going to be watching a movie on Netflix, you've got to have some popcorn in there. Yeah. So they're just kind of fun and a bit silly.
Suzy Chase: Okay. I just started a new job. What is a good way to celebrate?
Leah Hyslop: You've got to take something to the office, right, to make everyone like you. That's the key. So I have a blondie that I've called a first day on the job blondie. This is actually one of my favorite recipes in the whole book. It's like definitely the one that after having written all these recipes, I still kind of want to make all the time, which is usually a good sign. They're blondies. So they're white chocolate. They're not too rich. They're kind of sturdy enough to transport in a Tupperware to the office, which is also crucial.
Leah Hyslop: They're kind of flavored with like kind of chai latte spices. So there's like cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom. I love all those kind of spices, pecans. And then there's kind of like milk chocolate shards on top, which looks really effective. It's very simple. You just take a bar of chocolate, slice it into triangles and then just press those little triangles into the top. But they just, they look quite angular and cool. That was one of the challenges of the book I think, was coming up with ways to make them all look different rather than just slabs of brown.
Suzy Chase: Oh, I can't even imagine. Do you think that was one of the biggest hurdles?
Leah Hyslop: I think visually, because you have to think quite visually with the cookbook. We eat with our eyes, right? So it's all about kind of coming up with recipes that are tasty, but also kind of will look nice for the pictures. Because most people look at the picture and that's how they decide to cook. Right. What they decide they're going to do. So yeah, that was a little bit of a challenge, but it was quite a fun one and we had a really good food stylist on the book. She cut some out with little cookie cutters and things, which was a really good idea.
Suzy Chase: Okay, I'm having a bad day or I know someone who's having a bad day, what's going to cheer me up?
Leah Hyslop: For that, I think it's going to have to be my tea and sympathy brownies, which are very British and they are a classic brownie with just a hint of tea. Tea is quite tricky to infuse into food I always find. It's a difficult one to get kind of the flavor, but not have too much of it. Because it's quite kind of tannic, it's quite, but anyway. So it's flavored with a little bit of tea and then it's got biscuits pushed into the top, which looks really fun, especially if you've got like a selection box of biscuits. So you kind of got like round one, square ones. Looks really fun.
Suzy Chase: You said it's a hug in brownie form.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. Yeah. I think that's a good way of putting it.
Suzy Chase: Okay. I'm having a vegan dinner party.
Leah Hyslop: Ah yeah. So I made sure that in this book I was like, you have to have the recipes for kind of your vegan friends, your gluten free friends. So there's, trying to tick all the boxes here. I called it did I mention I'm a vegan and I went through a lot of tests for these trying to find out what would be the best kind of way to make a vegan brownie that tasted like the real thing. But this is finally what I got to and it's not that dissimilar from a conventional brownie in some ways. I've just used coconut oil instead of butter, plenty of dark chocolate. And then flax seed is the one kind of weird and wonderful ingredient. It's sometimes called Linseed, used a lot by vegan cooks. It's kind of a miraculous, weird little thing. Like, you put these seeds in with water and you stir them and they go kind of gelatinous, but they act like an egg essentially. You put that into a vegan recipe and it kind of helps set it, a bit like an egg does, hold it all together. So they're pretty cool.
Suzy Chase: You call that your secret ingredient. Now, does it have any flavor or does it just work as an egg?
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. You won't really taste it. It's got quite a neutral taste.
Suzy Chase: This is one of my favorites. I don't have any chocolate in the house. What do I do?
Leah Hyslop: Yeah, my husband loves this recipe, which I find a bit annoying because it's actually based on someone else's. I was like, can we have one that I came up with? So this is kind of based on an American recipe actually by, I don't know how you pronounce the surname, but Alice Medrich, who is pretty famous chocolate expert. So it's based on her recipe. All she uses is cocoa powder and no actual chocolate, but somehow they are amazing and really deep and grown up and also quite chewy, which is a nice quality in a brownie I think, underrated.
Suzy Chase: So what is it about this brownie that does it for your husband?
Leah Hyslop: I think they're a tiny bit less rich and I think it's the chewiness. People get very into like fudgy versus cakey in brownies. People are like, oh I like them fudgy. No, I like them cakey. But chewy is kind of the third category, I think.
Suzy Chase: Yeah. You call that the great war in brownie circles, which I thought was so funny.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah, it is. Isn't it? People get so impassioned about it. I mean, I think there's a place for all of them, like I tend to prefer a kind of intense squidgy brownie, but sometimes like a cakier one with a glass of milk is kind of nice.
Suzy Chase: So what if I want to make brownies for breakfast? Do you have an option for that?
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. Yeah. That was one of the first things I wanted to have was a breakfast brownie, because I just thought it would be funny. This one is essentially a brownie with Nutella in it. And Nutella is quite cool because if you use Nutella, you don't really have to use chocolate. Like it kind of provides chocolatey, Hazel nutty flavor and fats. Got some dried banana chip in it because breakfast, healthy. And then it's got a kind of crunchy chocolate topping using cereal. So I usually do it with cornflakes or puffed rice. So you get like kind of a nice kind of crunchy cereal topping on the top of the brownie.
Suzy Chase: So you even-
Leah Hyslop: It's good with raisins in it too.
Suzy Chase: It's good what?
Leah Hyslop: With raisins in it too.
Suzy Chase: Oh really? I see. I think raisins is another great war because like either love them or you hate them.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. I mean I do think the secret is soaking them in booze quite a lot of the time. If you soak them in like some sherry or something and then put them in a brownie recipe, I mean that is delicious.
Suzy Chase: I mean that solves everything.
Leah Hyslop: Exactly.
Suzy Chase: You even have a brownie recipe for the morning after.
Leah Hyslop: Yes. Yeah. The great classic combination of maple syrup and bacon, which I think will definitely kind of rouse you from your stupor.
Suzy Chase: I wondered this all my life and it happens to me every time. Why are brownies so difficult to slice?
Leah Hyslop: Oh, they are a nightmare. Aren't they? I mean, I'm quite practiced at it now, but even I sometimes struggle. I think it's a combination of things. I mean they are intensely squidgy things, right? Like they have a really high proportion of fat in them and chocolate compared to a normal cake, huge amounts of fats, not much flour, not much gluten to hold them together. So they're kind of intrinsically structurally quite unsound. I think also because we like them so much and they smell so good, we tend to rush to slice them. Right. Like as soon as they come out the oven, you kind of want one, but you kind of have to resist that because if you leave them to cool properly, they are so much easier to slice. And I often recommend people put them in the fridge for a couple of hours because they honestly, they will slice like a dream after that.
Suzy Chase: Oh, that's a good tip.
Leah Hyslop: I think actually the flavor improves. I don't know what the fridge does. I don't know what the science of it is, but somehow it sets them a bit and the fudginess kind of comes out a bit more. Yeah. I really like them from the fridge.
Suzy Chase: You know how people are way into cookie batter. I'm way into brownie batter.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. Brownie batter is delicious.
Suzy Chase: It's so much better than cookie batter. Cookie dough. Ugh.
Leah Hyslop: I'm with you, but I'm biased.
Suzy Chase: So some people like cakey and some people like chewy, but no one likes dry. How do we avoid dry?
Leah Hyslop: Oh, dry is hard. I mean, I think brownies, when I started this book, I was like, oh brownies, this will be a really easy book to write. And then about two months in, I was like, it's quite hard because a well cooked brownie is quite subjective, right? Like what you think is perfect and gooey, someone might be like, oh, that's really under baked. And they're really hard to tell when they're done. Like a cake, you stick a skewer in, don't you? And it comes out clean and you know it's done. So there's like this foolproof test and that doesn't exist for brownies. So that's really hard. And it depends on your oven. Oven's all run at slightly different temperatures.
Leah Hyslop: So my advice is generally keep an eye on them. If your oven runs hot, check them like five to 10 minutes before the cooking time is up. They're not going to sink like a cake might. So I would always do that. Have a little check. I often shake the tin. Like a little bit of a jiggle is fine. You wouldn't want that in a cake, but I tend to think with a brownie if it's moving a little bit, that's okay because they continue to set when they come out of the oven. You don't want it liquid, but a little bit of, a little tiny bit of a jiggle. That doesn't bother me.
Leah Hyslop: So I would often take them out then. But yeah. And I would always say, if you can just get a cheap oven thermometer, because it's kind of interesting to know. I mean, I find this kind of stuff interesting. And if you know that your oven runs like 20 degrees hotter, you know that your brownies are probably going to be ready a little bit earlier than others. So yeah, that's probably my top tips for avoiding dryness. You can do a skewer test of a kind like if you stick a skewer in and like it's liquid, it needs more time. If it comes out dry, you've kind of overdone it. But like if you've got like little clumps of brownies sticking to the skewer, that's kind of getting to cooked at that point.
Suzy Chase: It is funny because brownies are subjective and it seems like cake is so straightforward.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is why I feel like you can write a book about them because people have such different opinions.
Suzy Chase: You include a little brownie history in this cookbook. Who discovered the brownie, where did it come from?
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. I found this really interesting. So it turns up quite late, the brownie because chocolate has obviously been around, the cocoa bean has been around since ancient times, but it's not till the 1800s really that you get chocolate available in an affordable way, kind of like as like sweetened blocks basically that home cooks can use. It's really not till quite late in the 1800s that that becomes a thing. Chocolate baking isn't really a thing before that. Rich people had chocolate. They mostly had, it's like drinking chocolate in the 1700s and stuff. So it's kind of around the 1800s. There's lots of different theories and myths about who invented it. I mean, I love them all. I don't think any of them are probably true. There's one about a housewife who's called Mildred, but her nickname was brownie.
Leah Hyslop: And I think the story is that she kind of, she had to make a cake one day and it went really badly wrong. She forgot the baking powder or something, but all her guests loved it anyway. And the brownie was born. So I like that one. There's a story that this very like wealthy American socialite, she was having some sort of conference at a hotel or something. And she said to the chef, oh, can you come up with some treat that like all the women visiting my conference will love and the chef came up with the brownie. So we don't really know. They don't tell up in cookbook until like the late 1800s. So it's late, I think really.
Suzy Chase: But we do know it was born in the United States, right?
Leah Hyslop: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's 100% American invention. So I think it's one of the greatest inventions.
Suzy Chase: Let's call it the greatest invention.
Leah Hyslop: The greatest invention.
Suzy Chase: So the box mix made the brownie a household name. I love a brownie from a box. How about you?
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. So this is fascinating. So when I was researching this book, I read so much about American box brownies, the companies that made them like General Mills and stuff, they kind of produced a lot of leaflets and recipes. So it was kind of, a part of it was, they were kind of selling this idea to people. In the UK, we don't have a culture of box brownies in the same way. Like you can probably pick one up in the supermarket. It wasn't a part of our childhoods in the same way as it was for America. So I find that quite interesting. So I think our taste in brownies is maybe a little bit richer. Because we came to brownies later when they've kind of gone quite gourmet and it's all like about really dark chocolate. Whereas I think the American taste is maybe exactly sweeter and that's probably because of that heritage, the box brownie.
Suzy Chase: That's so interesting. Because if you would've asked me, I would've thought that you had box brownies back in the 70s too, 60s and 70s.
Leah Hyslop: Not really. I feel like the brownie kind of probably took off in the UK like in the 90s maybe.
Suzy Chase: Oh my gosh.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. Properly. I mean, I'm sure some people made them, but like in the kind of way you would walk into any coffee shop and there'd be a brownie on the counter. That's probably like 90s for us. So yeah. That's quite new and sexy for us.
Suzy Chase: I think that it took so long because it's so hard to slice.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. Maybe. People were just like, no, we will stick with a victorious sponge. Thank you. And our scones.
Suzy Chase: Not going to do, yes, they look great.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. That's just a mess.
Suzy Chase: Now to my segment called dream dinner party where I ask you who you most want to invite to your dream dinner party and why, and for this segment it can only be one person.
Leah Hyslop: It's got to be Nigella. Isn't it? I mean, it's just got to be Nigella. I just think she'd be really fun. I think she'd be really polite if your food wasn't up to scratch.
Suzy Chase: You know how many people say Nigella?
Leah Hyslop: Is it everyone?
Suzy Chase: It's nearly everyone.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah. She's just nice. Isn't she? She just seems like a nice person.
Suzy Chase: She's the best.
Leah Hyslop: I'm trying to think who else I would have, but you said one person. So I won't pick another.
Suzy Chase: Well, that's great. I'm with you.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Leah Hyslop: Ah, well you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at my name, @LeahHyslop. And I have a website, Leahhyslop.com as well.
Suzy Chase: And talk about Waitrose. I'm not, familiar with that grocery store.
Leah Hyslop: Oh yeah. Sure.
Leah Hyslop: Yeah, I work on Waitrose's food magazine. So Waitrose, it's a supermarket grocery store here in the UK. I don't know what the equivalent would be in the US, maybe like Whole Foods or something. Yeah. And they have a very well-regarded food magazine that's been running many, many years. So I'm the deputy editor on that. So that's the day job, is working on that. It's a fun mix. I'm surrounded by food at all times.
Suzy Chase: To purchase the Brownie Diaries, head on over to cookerybythebook.com. And thanks so much Leah for coming on Cookery by the Book Podcast.
Leah Hyslop: You're most welcome. Thanks for having me.
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