golden pearl brownie cake.

Could it be? The first time a PH recipe (half) lets me down?

I had pretty high hopes for this one. I mean come on- vanilla bean sort-of-mousse layer, a dense chocolate brownie studded with tons of toasty pecans and plenty of plump raisins in between. I think raisins don't just go with peanut butter, they work really well with chocolate too! Think cranberries and chocolate, but a sweeter version. I was sold the moment I read the description.

I think both the vanilla and chocolate layers are lacking in their respective flavours. The vanilla layer is actually a vanilla bean pastry cream lightened with whipped cream, but the ratio is of pastry cream to whipped cream is way too low, I feel. The vanilla didn't come through very strongly because of that and the overall texture is very airy, like extremely over-churned ice cream. Perhaps that was intended, but I'm not exactly digging it.

On the other end of the colour spectrum, the brownie wasn't chocolaty enough. The whole recipe called for only 2 1/2 ounces of chocolate. Surely anyone who bakes a brownie often enough knows that that measly amount can only churn out a few squares if you want it to be decently decadent. Again, maybe it was done on purpose so as to not overwhelm the vanilla layer.

Oh, by the way, this isn't exactly how the overall cake is supposed to be. The recipe instructed for the raisins to be incorporated into the vanilla layer but I forgot about them so I decided to mix them in with the brownie too. I like the way it turned out- the brownie being punctured with bits of nuttiness and juiciness, but it may not be a good thing for some because you may feel like eating nuts and raisins held together by brownie batter. Believe me, the ratio of add-ins to brownie is quite high, even without the raisins.

There won't be any recipe typed out, but you can check out other people's attempts at this too!