Indulging With Dulce de Leche

Ever had dulce de leche, Gentle Reader? If you're a caramel lover as I am and as the husband is, you've got to get your hands on some dulce de leche. It's magnificent stuff.

If you want to be really indulgent, as I was recently, you can whip up what I'm calling ooey-gooey dulce de leche brownies. Okay, yes, I'll admit that this creation is not entirely original. I started with the much-loved ooey-gooey peanut butter-chocolate brownies recipe and started futzing up a storm, all without any clue how things might turn out.

Ooey-Gooey Dulce de Leche Brownies1 caramel cake mix
1 14.1-oz. can dulce de leche
1/4 C reduced-fat butter or margarine, melted and cooled
1/4 C skim milk
1 large egg white or 3 T liquid egg whites, lightly beaten
1 7-oz. container of marshmallow creme
1/2-3/4 C milk chocolate and peanut butter chips

1. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F.
   
2. Combine 1/4 cup of dulce de leche with the melted butter, skim milk, egg white and cake mix. The batter will be very stiff.
   
3. Prepare a 13" x 9" cake pan with nonstick cooking spray.
   
4. Pour two-thirds of the batter into the pan, then spread it out into a thin layer with floured hands or an appropriate utensil.
   
5. Bake the base layer for 10 min.
   
6. Combine 1/2 cup of dulce de leche with the marshmallow creme and chips.
   
7. After removing the base layer from the oven, spread the marshmallow goo atop it.
   
8. Drop the remaining cake batter atop the goo.
   
9. Bake the brownies 30 min.

Yield: Two dozen brownies

Nutritional Info
I'm not even going to attempt to calculate the nutritional content per serving. The Nestle La Lechera brand of dulce de leche I used has 3 grams of fat, 3 grams of protein and 20 grams of carbs per serving, which isn't too evil. I'm not sure about the Duncan Hines caramel cake mix, as I've already tossed the box into the recycling cart.

Besides, Gentle Reader, these wouldn't be indulgent if they weren't a wee bit sinful.

The Faudie's Futzings
Obviously, this whole recipe comes from my futzing with the original. I wanted to do something special for the husband to celebrate his new job--and accompanying pay raise!--at work, and a few weeks ago, I'd bought for him the caramel cake mix at Wally World for all of 50 cents. (Love those clearance racks!) However, even when I bought the mix, I'd had no intention of using it just to make a cake. No, I had these caramel ooey-gooey brownies in mind even then.

Of course, I didn't intend then to make them dulce de leche ooey-gooey brownies. That sort of happened by happenstance. You see, Gentle Reader, I biked over to HEB after my workout because I knew I needed marshmallow creme and sweetened condensed milk to make the original recipe. Unfortunately, my local HEB was out of its cheaper house brand of fat-free sweetened condensed milk and its cheaper house brand of full-fat sweetened condensed milk. My only option was the Nestle La Lechera brand, which was about 20 cents more expensive.

Then I spied right alongside the La Lechera sweetened condensed milk the cans of dulce de leche. Hmmm... I pondered as I compared the ingredients and nutritional info of the La Lechera fat-free sweetened condensed milk and its dulce de leche product, so long as they're both milk-based products that are sweet and are rather thick, why couldn't I substitute the dulce de leche for the sweetened condensed milk? And if the cake mix is lacking in distinct caramel flavor, the dulce de leche just might amp it up.

Y'know, I got a few stares while standing in the baking goods aisle and pondering what to do. I was outfitted in my sweaty gym clothes and still sported my bike helmet, which I hadn't removed because I hadn't anticipated that the stop being all that long or that I'd be having an internal debate over what to do. Ah well. I've always flown my freak flag proudly, so why stop now?

By the way, Gentle Reader, have you even tried to work with canned dulce de leche? I hadn't, and the stuff wasn't at all what I expected. It wasn't as viscous as sweetened condensed milk or even the caramel topping I get occasionally to accompany apple slices. No, this stuff was...almost like paste. Thick and requiring a fair amount of effort to manipulate. I hadn't expected it to be so solid. But that didn't stop it from being damned delicious!

As I was putting together the cake batter, I thought ahead to the goo. Would peanut butter work well with the combined and similar flavors of caramel and dulce de leche? My mind immediately called up the flavor combinations of some candy bars. Snickers, specifically. Peanuts, caramel and chocolate make up that one, and I loves me some Snickers--although I only indulge with those two-bite bars Mars puts out at Halloween, and even then it's only one or two. (Yeah, I'm a frickin' saint, Gentle Reader.)

As I poured chips from the bag of Nestle Tollhouse peanut butter and milk chocolate morsels, I popped a few in my mouth along with a smidge of batter for, umm, quality control purposes. Yup, I was right: The flavor combination would work fairly well, if the marshmallow didn't do anything untowards in the baking. And just to make sure, I poured three-fourths of a cup into the creme because that half of a cup just didn't look like enough.

I can't tell you if the brownies smelled really scrumptious while baking since my sinuses have largely robbed me of my senses of smell and taste, not to mention my voice. That said, when I finally got to have a bite of the finished brownies, the caramel/dulce de leche flavors came through just fine. Woohoo!

Because I had about a quarter of the can of dulce de leche left over (hey, sometimes quality control requires more than one sample), I offered to warm a little bit of it up in the microwave to drizzle atop his second brownie to make it even more indulgent. The result? I first learned that even 13 seconds at 50% power is too much when nuking dulce de leche. Second, the husband and I both decided that the drizzled dulce de leche didn't really add anything to the brownie. Did nuking the dulce de leche destroy the flavor? Perhaps. I dunno.

The husband proposed that these are blondie brownies, but I've associated blondie brownies with butterscotch, and these brownies are definitely not butterscotchy. Caramel all the way, baby!