Old-timey Cooking - Brownies

I've been looking forward to making the Palmer House brownies since I made brownies the last time (which you can read about here).  Now, my brownie recipe is pretty different from the Palmer House one.  All the basic ingredients are there - chocolate, flour, sugar, butter, eggs - but the Palmer House recipe uses more of everything.  I mean a lot more.  For the same size pan.  This is madness, I tell you, sheer madness! 

I sprung for some of the good stuff.

Process-wise, the Palmer House recipe is also a bit different.  For one thing, it calls for semisweet chocolate as opposed to the bittersweet I normally use.  I used the evaporated cane sugar again, which I think is a tad less sweet than normal granulated sugar, so I'm hoping that these brownies don't come out cloyingly sweet.  Anyway, the chocolate and butter are melted in a double boiler (which I now have, thanks Dad!), and then that mixture is added to a flour-sugar-baking powder mixture.  My normal recipe is a super simple one-pot wonder where the dry ingredients are mixed into the chocolate, rather than the other way around.  

Ahh, the double boiler.

 Anyway, so everything mixed together easily and went into the oven without a problem.  That's when everything got messed up.  The recipe, from the National Culinary Review, (available here) calls for pouring the batter into a 9x12 inch pan (I used a 9x13 - who has a 9x12?) and baking for 30-40 minutes in a 300 degree oven.  Okay, easy enough.  The directions read, "brownie is done when it has risen about 1/4 inch and edges begin to turn crispy" except that's not really what happened.  I checked in after half an hour.  The edges of the brownie did rise, but the rest of it was so underdone that I put it back in for another ten minutes.  That's when I noticed that the brownie had over-spilled the pan and was burning on the bottom of my oven.  How pleasant. 

NOT what the picture with the recipe looks like.

So I'm not sure what went wrong.  I've checked and double-checked the recipe and am not sure how they could get something so different from me (and especially with me using a larger pan - you'd think if anything the brownies would be thinner and cook faster).  I'll have to do some more research into the Palmer House recipe to see if maybe there's a typo there.  Or, I guess I could have taken the brownies out of the oven after 30 minutes, but really they were so underdone I was worried they'd spill out of the pan if I took it out.  Huh. 

I've decided to scrap the apricot glaze that the recipe calls for, since something is clearly already wrong with the brownie base.  Once I figure that out, I'll go whole hog with the apricot glaze.  They still taste good, though - someone had to cut off all the part that was on the edge of the pan, and it's not like I was just going to throw it away...