Brownies are a special treat that almost everyone loves, but whether you use a mix or make them from scratch, it can be easy to mess up one of the steps in the baking process.
The first thing to remember is to follow all of the directions to the letter in order to reduce the odds of the taste or texture coming out wrong. If you find you’ve added too much water to brownie mix, you can usually remedy the situation by adding some additional flour just a little bit at a time until the consistency is right.
Taste and Texture of Brownies
Just as with other baked goods, brownies usually have both wet ingredients that you add yourself and dry ingredients that are part of the mix when you buy them in a box. The wet ingredients usually include water, eggs and oil, but if you don’t read the directions carefully, you might add too much of one of these ingredients, and it’s usually the water.
Extra water in your brownie batter can be bad because the batter needs to be smooth and pour easily into the pan when you’re ready to put it in the oven.
Everything you do when making up your brownie batter will affect both the taste and the texture of the brownies. In other words, it’s possible for the brownies to taste good yet have a mushy texture, or taste bad while looking good. If you add more water than you should and your batter is too runny, the first thing you should do is add some extra flour to the mixture. Add one tablespoon of flour at a time, then mix the batter before deciding whether you should add more flour.
Many cooking pros recommend that if you add a total of four tablespoons to your brownie mix and the batter still isn’t right, you should go ahead and start over with another batch. Indeed, if your batter is still very runny even after adding four tablespoons of flour, the brownies are very likely already ruined. This is because if you add more than four tablespoons of flour, the brownies will usually come out too dry once they’re baked.
What Else Can You Do?
Some people also bake their brownies a little longer than the instructions say instead of adding more dry items, but this can negatively impact the taste or texture. If you decide to increase the cooking time, add just five extra minutes at a time and see if that works. If you take them out of the oven and find that they taste good but they look like a mess, you can cover them with icing or even chocolate syrup to disguise them a little bit.
Before you put them in the oven (and if they aren’t too watery) you can always try adding a small amount of cocoa powder. This will add thickness to the batter and a little more chocolate flavoring. This is another dry ingredient that you can use to thicken up the batter so that the mixture isn’t as watery and runny.
Of course, the best way to avoid all of this is to read the instructions carefully in the beginning and make sure that you measure everything carefully before adding it to your batter. But it’s still good to know that if you do accidentally add excess water to your brownie batter, there are a few ways to fix it.