Chocolate Strawberry Dowiches

It's been a while.

       Our last post came to you from Nantucket, where we stayed together for about a week. Byrne left for two weeks of culinary camp in MA, and then spent some time in Ohio for a wedding (for which she got to wear the most gorgeous shoes ever!). Charlotte spent the last four weeks sailing around Canada. In a boat. Needless to say, we have both had fabulous summers. We've just been reunited and there about two weeks before school starts.

       Last night, we couldn't quite decide what to make and post on the blog. Byrne's mom mentioned that she had bought some brownie mix, but as delicious as brownies from a box are, they just didn't seem blog worthy. 

Lightbulb!

       We got the idea to use the brownie mix to make something other than brownies. So, out came this adorable pan that has been sitting at the back of Byrne's cupboard for quite some time. The pan makes miniature donut rings, about 2 inches in diameter. Using a banana and a couple dollops of creamy greek yogurt in place of oil, we came up with a less thick brownie batter. The batter didn't taste quite as dreamy  as we hoped. It had a very powdery aftertaste, but we decided to bake it anyway and pray that they came out well. An hour later, we had come up with the most fabulous little dessert sandwiches.
      With the help of our friend Vivien, we set up our first real "photoshoot". Generally, we snap a few pics of the finished product with one of our digital cameras. However, we've been really hoping that one of our posts will be published on Tastespotting, a "community driven visual potluck". Bloggers and other people of the food industry publish food related pictures on the site. When clicked, they lead you to  blog posts, articles, etc. If you've never seen it, you should really check it out. It is a wonderful place to find recipes and the pictures are all beautiful. In fact, that was the reason that our blog posts were declined by Tastespotting. The pictures were not quite good enough. So this time, we took an endless number of shots, playing with lighting, focus, props and shadows. Finally, Charlotte snapped the winner. Or at least what we thought was the winner. Unfortunately, we didn't end up using it in our submission because the pictures need to be cropped into squares, and we just couldn't crop this one to how we liked it. We used an alternate, but the picture below is still our favorite. Hopefully the Tastespotting board will like the 2nd place picture!

We really loved how the strawberries could be seen in the background. We used them as decoration on the plate for several shots and had abandoned them at this point, but they snuck their way into the picture anyway!

Chocolate Strawberry Dowiches
Makes 24 rings or 12 dowiches


For the brownies:

1 cup brownie mix

1 banana

2 spoonfuls greek yogurt

2 tablespoons milk


For the icing:

1 stick of butter

2 tbsp cocoa powder

2 cups powder sugar


7-8 diced strawberries

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit, and grease your pan. If you do not have a mini-donut pan like we do, you can use a muffin tin and fill it to about half of an inch.
2. Combine the brownie mix, banana, greek yogurt, and milk. Pour this into the pan, and bake for 10-13 minutes.
3. While the dowiches are baking, mix together the icing, powdered sugar and cocoa powder. 
4. Let the dowiches cool, then spread some icing on one of the rings, put some strawberries on, and place another ring on top.