Baking and Books discussion

I'm trying to work on my brownies and seem to be running into the same problem over and over again.
The edge of the brownie nearest the baking tray tends to dry out before the rest is cooked, any ways I can avoid this or am I stuck trimming the edges off?

Do you have this problem on all Brownie recipes or only this one you are working on? I'm assuming it isn't a general oven problem.

Are you following a recipe from a cookbook or is this one you've done yourself?

Basically when you bake, you are removing moisture from a recipe. The more moisture, the longer it takes.

So you have a couple of choices. You can turn down the oven and bake longer at a lower temperature, or you can adjust your recipe to have less moisture, so it takes less time.

The adjusting is tricky, as you may know, because if your liquid is dairy, by cutting down on the liquid you also cut down on the fat, which is part of what makes things so good.

More details would help. :)

For example, have you tried turning the oven down a little and baking for longer? Or lining the brownie pan with baking parchment? Is your oven fan-assisted? Mine is and I tend to find it's pretty vicious at high temps - I can usually get a better result by turning it down 10-20oC and baking for the suggested time. If I stick to the time in the book everything gets frazzled. At lower temps like 160oC, though, most cakes seem to need quite a bit longer.

It would also help to know your recipe - higher proportions of flour to wet ingredients would lead the mix to dry out faster, for example.

x-post with Jute, sorry!

I'm using the beetroot brownie recipe from River cottage. But I hate beetroot so I've removed it and compensated by reducing the amount of flour and increasing the amount of sugar.

Well...you'll be losing a significant amount of moisture and starchy carbs if you're taking the beetroot out, there's a lot of water in them (have you actually tried it, out of curiosity? Cos I hate beetroot too but I can't taste it in Red Velvet cake). Adding sugar probably won't help. I'd go for maybe adding another egg, increasing your fat a little, or perhaps a couple of tablespoons of milk. You could try keeping the same volume of dry ingredients and substituting some of the flour for ground almonds also.

I haven't tried it out yet but there is a beetroot brownie recipe in my favourite Red Velvet And Chocolate Heartache; reviews I've read of that recipe suggest you really really need to turn the oven down and bake it slowly for longer (it says 30mins in the book but 50mins is more like it). I'd definitely give that a try!