Mexican Hot Chocolate Brownies with Mexican Hot Chocolate Icing (dude, yum)

For Cinqo de Mayo, our office decided to have a potluck. True to form, I volunteered for dessert. I found a recipe online for Mexican brownies. For some reason, it just wasn’t enough. I wanted some icing… something awesomey chocolatey and spicy. Cue the Mexican hot chocolate icing… Yuuum. 

You can find this recipe for the Mexican Brownies where I did, here.

Ingredients!

1 box Betty Crocker fudge brownie mix (I'm sure you could use any one, but I used this and it rawked)
1/4 cup water
1/2 cup oil
2 eggs
2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon almond extract

 - Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease mini muffin pans THOROUGHLY with no paper liners. 

- Mix all ingredients together

*drool face*

- Bake mini brownies for about 10-13 minutes or until toothpick inserted into center has moist crumbs clinging to it. 

There is a note on my recipe: don't wait for the toothpick to come out clean. If there is wet batter on the brownie, bake for another minute or two. If you overcook them you will get the dreaded brick brownie. And nobody wants that.

Just these brownies would have been enough. The cinnamon and almond added so much to the fudgie brownies. Oh. Em. Gee. So freakin tastey.

I let them cool forever. Mostly because I was trying to spread them out over a week night or two so I didn't overload myself after work, but also because I was planning on putting icing on them so they needed to be completely cool to avoid the whole melty icing thing.


I think I got the recipe for the icing at Epicurious, so I'm linking you to that. If this is your recipe, speak up. If not, hit the print button.

I always get my ingredients together before starting a recipe... especially when baking. For one, it makes me feel like I'm on a cooking show and I get to put pictures of them on my blog. On the other hand, it helps to make sure you don't over-measure into your batter while it's spinning. Saves time, too. You also know that you've got everything in there. To recap, 1, makes me feel special. 2, peace of mind. Moving on...

1 8oz package cream cheese, room temperature (do yourself a favor and remember to take this out before you go to make the icing. I always forget with cream cheese and butter. It really screws up your baking mojo)
1/2 (1 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature (see aside above)
1 teaspoon chili powder
1/2 teaspoon ground cinammon
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
3 cups confectioners' sugar, sifted
3 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted

Cream the cream cheese and butter together thoroughly. Add the chili powder and cinnamon and mix to incorporate.

Add the salt, vanilla, and confectioners' sugar.

So... yeah, sifted confectioners' sugar, right? Using a gift certificate from the wedding, I got myself a sifter because I didn't have anything except a freaking colander to sift flour and sugar. So, Ms. Martha came to the rescue:

So, I filled it and set myself down to press the thing over and over again and get a nice, fluffy snow-like pile of sweet stuff.

Except... THE DAMN THING DIDN'T WORK!

I think it was broken, I don't know if I can return it or not... but in the meantime I had a freaking BATTLE with my powdered sugar to get it out of this thing and into the stupid colander. And then tap it out. Sugary, powdery goodness everywhere! And one frustrated baker...

EVERY. WHERE. GAH!

Anyway, add the stupid sugar and stuff.

Then melt your chocolate. I prefer to do it in a double boiler (that's what she said)... I don't like to use to microwave unless I have to.  And chocolate can be very fickle, I'd rather have control of my heat and my stirring.

And into the mixer this yummy, velvety melted chocolate goes.

This is where the recipe says that add more confectioner's sugar a little at a time if you need it thickened. I didn't. And there was also no FREAKIN WAY I WAS SIFTING ANYMORE DAMN SUGAR.

I did add more chocolate though, I felt that the cream cheese taste was overwhelming and there wasn't a really chocolate flavor.

But good... holy crap delicious.

Now to get my yum on my nom... to make yummy nommings... my weapon of choice:

Martha Stewart cookie gun! Can also be used to pipe icing and inject icing into things. Of this baby is gonna get a lot of use. I was a little skeptical on how it would work, being a gun instead of a piping bag. But it turned out to work perfectly... I never had very much luck with piping bags. I, obviously, need heavier artillery.

My victims:

And my first failure (if you don't count Battle Powdered Sugar):

OK... so... LOL... at first I didn't know what I was doing so i tried to just glob it on there. When I figured out how the icing came out of the gun and whatnot, I eventually got it down to single little swirl that looked pretty dang awesome if I do say so myself.

Couldn't be happier really with how they turned out. They tasted as good as they looked, and the crowd was as impressed as I was flabbergasted that I had actually created something that looked real.


And although they were freaking fantastic, I had some changes to the icing and only the icing. I love cream cheese icing as much as the next girl, but I wanted something much more... spicy and chocolatey and all that junk. Next time, I would cut back on the cream cheese and throw in some more chocolate and chili powder. We'll see how that goes. In order to remember things like this, I always make notes on my recipes so I remember.

Now this post would be over except it's not. This icing recipe made a TON. Way more than I needed for my little guys. So I decided to make a 2nd batch of cupcakes for Mother's Day dinner.

Except, they failed. For some god forsaken reason, the brownies refused to pop out of my mini cupcake tins. RE-Freaking-fused. No matter what I did... bake them longer, let them cool longer, tried greasing with both Crisco and Olive Oil... nothing worked and they just kept falling apart. I don't think I did anything different... the brownies tasted the same, just weren't holding together at all.

I almost ran out of time, so in a last act of desperation, I made one big brownie for my mother-in-law, injected it with the icing (yay cookie gun) and plopped some on top. For everyone else, I still had some of the other whole cupcakes so I got rid of them shared the goodness at my brother-in-law's house.

I took the crumbled brownies and remaining icing and put them in the fridge for another project. But that's another story to be told another time... Make these brownies, they're awesome. But watch the confectioners' sugar....