Salted caramel pretzel brownies – crunchy pretzel crust topped with rich, fudgey dark chocolate brownie and a sticky, gooey, sweet-salty caramel.  Jump to Recipe 

Just booked a Gelato Messina appreciation class!! They are normally only held in Sydney, but have just opened up one class per month in Fitzroy (Melbourne) for the rest of this year. Clearly I jumped at the opportunity – two hours of learning to make gelato, having a gelato degustation, getting to try as many flavours as you want out of the cabinet (up to 40!) and taking your own tub of gelato home – there was no way I was passing it up. Gelato Messina is legendary here, having been voted best gelato in Australia by the Good Food Guide, and for good reason: as well as the 40 permanent flavours (salted caramel and white chocolate, chocolate fondant, pandan and coconut, pear and rhubarb..), they also offer 5 weekly special flavours – crazy combinations that constantly bring people back for more. Some of my favourite specials have been the Crack Pie and Cereal Milk (based on Christina Tosi’s infamous Momofuku Milk Bar creations) and the Robert Brownie Jnr (chocolate gelato with chocolate brownie and chocolate fudge), but other recent flavours have included Copper’s Delight (peanut butter and coffee gelato layered with coffee caramel and doughnuts) and LMP (lemon custard gelato with shortcrust, baked meringue and lemon curd). You get the picture.

Also: only two more days of university left for the semester! Cannot believe it. This year is absolutely flying by – I did my first blog post here on January 20th, and now almost four months have passed. I do feel like writing has become easier: both my reviews and recipe posts take less time and the words seem to come a little more naturally than they initially did. And I love it – blogging provides such a different, and more creative, outlet than university work, and gives me a chance to get a bit of perspective and get my brain out of science and study mode, even if just for a short time. However, without a kitchen at college, all this inspiration and motivation to try recipes I have seen on other blogs or attempt flavour combinations I have experienced at cafes is being built up higher and higher – I definitely need to get home soon for the break and spend some serious time baking.

However, I did get to make something pretty amazing (if I do say so myself!) last week, which I couldn’t wait any longer to share with you. I commandeered a friend’s kitchen to make these Salted Caramel Pretzel Brownies for Cathy’s birthday – we had been eyeing up a few similar recipes during lectures (oops) and her upcoming birthday presented the perfect opportunity to surprise her with them. Without a 20x30cm tin available, I ended up using a 20×20 tin (probably better considering how rich they are!), and adapted a few different recipes – so was a little apprehensive about the result.

They turned out to be an absolute winner. The crunchy, salty pretzel crust blended with the brownie – rich, fudgey, dark chocolate – and the sticky, gooey, sweet-salty combo of the caramel topping to create the perfect mouthful of omg-just-one-more. Yes, the runny caramel can make a bit of a mess, and leave you with sticky fingers, and yes, it can be a little tricky to cut – but it is SO worth it. Keep it in the fridge so the caramel doesn’t melt absolutely everywhere, and pull it 10 or 20 minutes before serving to get it back to that perfect state of melty gooey crunchiness. YES.

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Last week was my little brother’s 14th birthday (he will always be little to me, even when he surpasses me in height!). His first birthday away from the rest of us, he spent the weekend with a friend in Whangamata in the waves, without the traditional morning birthday presents and lavish cake on the day. Luckily for him, I was not about to miss a chance to make said lavish cake – a perfect reason to use quantities of butter, sugar and cream that I can’t ordinarily justify, due to both the expense and my waistline! What resulted was a double layer chocolate and salted caramel cake, a gorgeous tower of silky, dark brown ganache and asymmetric caramel drips.
What surprised me was how easy this cake was to put together. Of course, you couldn’t suddenly decide to make it for dessert at four o’clock in the afternoon, but with a wee bit of planning it wasn’t too tricky. I made the two 20cm cakes in the morning to allow them time to cool, put together the caramel and chocolate ganache after lunch, and then constructed it right before dinner. Spacing out the components of a cake like this makes it seem far less overwhelming and time-consuming, ensuring you never get too frazzled and the kitchen never quite makes it to a state of extreme I-can’t-deal-with-this mess.
The cake recipe itself is a winner – a Chocolate Zucchini (!) cake from the Little and Friday Celebration’s cookbook. I didn’t want to tell my brothers about the zucchini component of the cake beforehand, concerned that they might be put off and spend time trying to identify hidden bits of zucchini in their dessert. They did find out, but my fears proved to be unfounded: the cake was totally demolished and the zucchini only served to add moisture to the finished product. The original recipe called for two x 18cm cake tins, but as I didn’t own any, did not see any reason to buy them for the sake of one cake, and thought the recipe looked pretty big anyway, I went with my 20cm tins and it turned out perfectly. You could easily use your favourite chocolate cake recipe for two x 20cm cakes here.

The salted caramel recipe I took from a blog called Matkonation, and despite my worries that either the caramel would burn or I would burn myself, it was very successful and a recipe I would recommend. I had extra left over after I constructed the cake, so drizzled more over each slice as I served it. If you find it gets too thick as it cools, especially if you leave it in the refrigerator, you can warm it up either in a pot or in the microwave to thin it out.

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