For some reason I always think brownies are the perfect thing to add stuff to. But when I try putting cheeses in brownies, it’s very touch and go.

Cream cheese is the standard add-in, but I had one massive brownie fail a while ago that involved some unwieldy mascarpone cheese. And on this go, I had a very near-fail with goat cheese!

I was using goat cheese because you guys voted for a goat cheese dish last week. I thought that it might work really nicely in a chocolate brownie with some raspberries folded in. I had dreams of these luscious dark brownies with streaks of goat cheese running through them.

It didn’t really work out like that obviously. The good news is that even though my plan completely backfired and failed, the brownies tasted really good.

I guess cooking is like poker. I’d rather be lucky than good!

Goat Cheese Brownies

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Author: Nick Evans
Servings: 16 Servings
Prep Time: 20 minutes
Total Time: 50 minutes
An almost recipe disaster that actually turned out being very good. A standard chocolate brownie with raspberries and goat cheese folded in!

Ingredients 

  • ½ Cup (1 stick) unsalted butter
  • 5 ounces unsweetened chocolate, (get the good stuff)
  • 1 Cup sugar
  • 2 large eggs
  • ¾ Cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 Cup fresh or frozen raspberries, if frozen, thaw in a paper towel to absorb moisture
  • Pinch of salt

Goat Cheese Filling:

  • 6 ounces goat cheese, (chevre)
  • ½ Cup sugar
  • 1 egg

Instructions

  • Melt butter and chocolate together in a saucepan over low heat.  Be careful not to burn the chocolate.  When melted, remove from heat and let cool for a few minutes.
  • For the goat cheese mixture, beat everything together until smooth.
  • Once slightly cool, stir in sugar until dissolved and then beat in the eggs, one at a time.  Finally, add a pinch of salt and mix in the flour.
  • Stir in the raspberries and goat cheese mixture.  The goat cheese mixture is optional honestly.
  • Add batter to a buttered 8-inch baking dish.  Bake at 350 degrees for 30-35 minutes (20-25 minutes if you aren’t using the goat cheese mixture).
  • Let cool for 30 minutes before cutting and serving.  They should be pretty gooey.  If you want them firmer, you might want to add another 5 minutes onto the baking time.

Nutrition

Serving: 1Piece | Calories: 246kcal | Carbohydrates: 30g | Protein: 5g | Fat: 14g | Saturated Fat: 8g | Polyunsaturated Fat: 1g | Monounsaturated Fat: 4g | Trans Fat: 0.2g | Cholesterol: 51mg | Sodium: 54mg | Potassium: 107mg | Fiber: 2g | Sugar: 23g | Vitamin A: 334IU | Vitamin C: 2mg | Calcium: 33mg | Iron: 2mg
Course: Desserts

Did you make this recipe?

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The Goat Cheese

My grand vision for this dish started with the goat cheese. I thought I’d blend together some goat cheese with some sugar and an egg to give it some body and then be able to streak that into the batter.

goat cheese part
Farm fresh eggs are orange.

The problem, as you’ll see, is that this ended up being too liquidy to work. But it does taste good. So feel free to go with it. Just use a hand mixer or fork to really mix the goat cheese up well until it’s a nice smooth consistency.

The Brownie Batter

This part of the recipe I wasn’t worried about. Good chocolate brownies are pretty straightforward to make as long as you don’t overcook them!

I don’t trust brownie recipes that start with something other than chocolate and butter.

choc and butter
The start of something beautiful

Melt these two ingredients together over low heat. Once they are melted and combined, let them cool for a minute and then stir in the sugar.

batter
Pretty standard here.

The Raspberries

Ideally, you would use fresh raspberries for this, but I couldn’t find any on this particular day so I thought I’d try out frozen. The problem with frozen raspberries is that there’s a lot of liquid that will come out when you defrost them.

I solved this problem to the best of my ability by thawing them out in the microwave on low power over some paper towels. That way the towels soak up all the liquid as they thaw.

If it looks like a murder scene, you’ve done it right!

defrost
If you must use frozen…

Back to the batter

To finish off the brownie batter, beat in one egg at a time and add a pinch of salt. Then stir in the flour and your batter is ready to go!

After that, gently fold in the raspberries. Try not to over-mix it at this point or all the raspberries will just break apart.

mixed
Try to be gentle with the berries.

Then pour the batter into a buttered 8-inch baking dish and you’re ready to go. Please note that you could just bake them at this point and skip all the goat cheese business.

poured
Butter the pan!

THE FAIL

Ok. So this is where I went wrong. I thought I’d be able to pour my goat cheese mixture onto the batter and then pull a knife through the batter to form some cool streaks.

The problem of course is that this technique only works if both batters are the same consistency. Otherwise they won’t really play nice.

In my case you’ll get something like this.

oops
Oh dear….

If I were to toss this in the oven, I’m not sure what would happen, but I knew it wouldn’t be good. So I decided to go out on a limb and just stir the goat cheese mixture into the chocolate batter.

I grabbed an emergency fork (just a normal fork, but for emergencies) and just started whipping the two together in the baking dish. After a minute of mixing, I had something that looked pretty okay!

mixed up
Here’s to hopin!

Baking the dish

I added a lot of moisture into my batter (which turns out to be awesome). I knew though that I would have to therefore bake this for much longer than a normal batter.

So I baked mine at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. You could go for 35-40 if you like a firmer brownie.

My came out looking surprisingly good.

baked
Looks good actually!

I let these guys cool almost completely before chopping them up. The consistency I had was exactly what I like in brownies: gooey.

bam
Gooey and pretty darn good!

The official Macheesmo taste-tester (wife) had a bite of one of these and declared:

“Weird.”

But I must say, I thought they tasted pretty darn good. They’re definitely unique. The goat cheese has kind of a tangy flavor to it and the raspberries are really good folded in.

So, I was pretty happy with how these turned out given the near fail. Of course, if you want to try these, you can just fold the goat cheese mixture directly into the batter when you fold in the raspberries near the end or just leave out the goat cheese mixture and keep the raspberries.

If anyone has any ideas on how to accomplish what I was trying to do, leave a comment!