I've got a great brownie recipe that works awesome in a 9×11 pan. The top comes out crunchy, the bottom cake like and the middle nice and fudgy. I figured I would try to make them in a mini-muffin tin, thinking it would be easier for the kids to eat. Ended up with a mini disaster.
Things I had not counted on: they rose seemingly more than in the 9×11 pan. Too much cake like vs not enough fudge center.
Should there be things I need to be aware of? I cut a good 7 or 8 minutes off my cooking time of 25 minutes int eh 9×11 pan, and even still, they were over cooked. But more importantly, I realized that with all edges being cooked (as opposed to square in the 9×11), there is a lot of "cake surface" vs soft and fudgy centre.
Is there something i should consider doing specifically to the recipe? Is there a way to make good fudgy brownies in a mini-muffin tin, or am I just looking for trouble?
Recipe is butter-free (just uses vegetable oil) and only 1 tsp of baking soda as a leavening agent.
Best Answer
Brownies are bar cookies. Note that the brownies are at the edge of the pan are more cooked, and raised higher: they set before they settle back down.
Baking the brownies in a mini-muffin tin will essentially make each mini-brownie all edge. They will rise and set very rapidly, and then easily over bake.
I would suggest that brownies are not ideal in a mini-muffin tin. Instead, cutting them smaller would be a better solution.
If you do want to try it again, I would suggest:
Don't overfill the tins. You don't want the batter more than about 1/2 inch deep; you want about the same depth it would be in the pan for which they are designed.
Let the batter sit for about 5-10 minutes after portioning into the muffin tins. This will give some additional time for the sugars to dissolve, and the flour to hydrate since they won't have as much time in the oven. This should help texture and crust development (the shiny crackly top).
Reduce or eliminate the chemical leavening. I would experiment with cutting the baking powder by 50% to start.
There are ways to incorporate air into brownie batter mechanically, by (for example) beating air into the egg-butter-chocolate mixture, but the exact way to approach it would depend on your particular brownie recipe. If you go that route, you can probably completely eliminate the baking powder.
Reduce the oven temperature by about 25 F (maybe even 50 F in a second trial, if they still over bake and are too crusty too rapidly) or so, to allow the baking process to slow, and give more time for the mini-brownies to rise and settle.
Check them much sooner. Mini-brownies are going to go from not-done to overdone very, very quickly. I would start checking as early as 15 minutes, until you have an expectation. When you can smell the chocolaty aroma is a good time to start checking.
Bake only one mini-muffin tray at a time, so that they are even. You don't want shadow effects and changes in oven convection to throw off the baking by having more than one tray in the oven at the same time, although that is more an issue of consistency than it is of the complete character of the outcome.