Bourbon Brownies

At the beginning of the summer I vowed to try new bourbon recipes from my Kentucky Bourbon Cookbook. Admittedly, this resolution has gotten off to a slow start.  To date, I have only made two recipes - Chicken Kentuckiana and Pan-Seared Salmon with Chipotle Lime Bourbon Glaze. Fortunately last weekend I got back on track with Bourbon Brownies.  The recipe required some ingenuity - like devising my own double boiler...

Not as attractive as a Dutch oven, but it does the trick.

I couldn't find the exact recipe from my cookbook and don't want to run into any copyright issues, but here is a quick overview of what's required. First, you soak pecans in bourbon until they absorb half of the bourbon (roughly a half an hour). Then you toast the bourbon-soaked pecans and put aside the bourbon for later in the baking process. Next, you use the double boiler (or a contraption similar to the pic above) to melt unsweetened chocolate, butter and margarine. Once you've cooled the chocolate mixture, you stir in flour, brown sugar, granulated sugar, cocoa and the left over bourbon. Then you bake (in my oven, this took 15 minutes longer than the prescribed 25 minutes)...

YUM!

The end result is fantastic, fudgy, and deliciously bourbon-y.