Today’s musical inspiration is courtesy of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs:
Years ago, I found a recipe for the charmingly-named Man Catcher Brownies in a magazine. Brownies are good, but brownies with a layer of caramel in the centre? Yes, please. I’ve made them several times and even shared them with coworkers, and somehow don’t have a harem of husbands, so perhaps the name is a bit of an exaggeration. Ahem.
Recently, I was leafing through one of my mom’s cookbooks. When I hit a recipe for saucily-named brownies, I glanced at it briefly before realizing that this was exactly the same recipe. There were a couple of minor tweaks; for example, how the second brownie layer was added, and a heck of a lot more caramel, but otherwise this was it. And despite having had the recipe in my collection for ages, I was suddenly craving them again. Luckily for me, my Baking Buddy was all in.
(You can find the recipe for Man Catcher Brownies here. The recipe comments include a step-by-step video from the girl who originally submitted the recipe to the magazine, so these are the originals, folks!)
First, we gathered our ingredients:
I have a question for my American friends, if anyone wants to chime in down below in the comments. Are you guys experiencing an ever-shrinking selection at the grocery store, too, or is that just happening here? Every single version of the recipe I’ve seen calls for a German chocolate cake mix, and if I had to wait to find one, these babies would never get made. It feels like over the last…ooh, decade or more, for sure, and probably much longer, all the grocery chains have been supplanting their previously wide array of certain products with their own store brand, leaving us with only a few token flavours/varieties. There is no orange cake mix, or German chocolate cake mix, or strawberry cake mix. We’re lucky to have a choice between devil’s food and regular chocolate. Meanwhile, President’s Choice, Compliments, and Co-op Gold all pop up like so many weeds. I’m pretty sure the same thing is happening with Jello flavours too (remember Berry Black?), and possibly canned soup. And yes, we bought a store brand mix for this because it’s not being used for an actual cake, but I’m sure the holy spirit of Huncan Dines (apologies to V.N.) is furious.
The most tedious part of this is unwrapping all the caramels…
I promise it’s worth it, though! With a little evaporated milk, these form a beautiful soft centre for our brownies.
Meanwhile, the cake mix, melted butter, and more evaporated milk get mixed together. The dough turns out really stiff, which makes this parting-of-the-Red-Sea trick really easy.
I did what felt like the logical thing, and divided it in half – half for the bottom and half for the top, right? Makes sense. The only problem is that half of this will not quite cover the bottom of a 9″ x 13″ pan, and you’ll need to borrow some from the top’s share. I had forgotten this from the last time I made them, and suddenly the fact that the version of the recipe in my mom’s book uses a 9″ square pan makes a lot more sense. After some mild cussing on my part, my Baking Buddy took over to get the dough pressed into the corners of the pan, and then we threw the whole mess in the oven for 7 minutes. The process of baking and puffing-up hides a multitude of sins, and I was already feeling better.
Now it’s time to top it! First, the caramel sauce gets spread over everything:
The partially-cooked bottom layer is quite delicate at this point, and spreading the caramel too vigorously will tear it. Once we were happy with our caramel coverage, we sprinkled some pecan pieces and semi-sweet chocolate chips over it, and then topped with the remaining dough. The problem with using more than half the dough for the bottom is that there won’t be enough to completely cover the top.
By this point, I was ready to pitch the whole thing, because really! But much like the bottom puffed up after baking, so too did the top after we stuck it back in the oven.
I don’t think anybody is going to be fooled into thinking that the top is completely covered (it’s not), but it was an improvement for sure. A little peekaboo caramel never hurt anyone, right?
The recipe is pretty adamant that they cool completely before slicing, so we waited patiently.
They sliced like a dream! And once they were cut into itty-bitty pieces (we got 32 from our pan), the exposed caramel wasn’t nearly as noticeable – it became more of a hint of what was to come than a huge breach in the middle of the pan.
Look at that lovely gooey caramel!
We layered ours between parchment in an airtight container, but these would make a perfect homemade gift for someone presented in a cute little treat box.
Thanks for looking! 🙂
The Witty Child 