Dark Chocolate Blood Orange Brownies with Red Cherries

A couple of weeks ago I had a rare Saturday off work and it just so happened to be absolutely beautiful outdoors! I decided to take full advantage of this and go to a local Farmers market in my neighborhood in search for some really great watermelon. Unfortunately, I was unable to find much fresh produce that I desired or needed but I did happen upon Primo Oils, a vendor that sells gourmet olive oils and vinegars. They had me at "peach white balsamic". :)

After tasting some very interesting flavors such as chocolate balsamic, I ended up getting the peach white balsamic and a blood orange olive oil. While I wasn't able to score any great watermelon or berries, I had some new ingredients to experiment with so I was pretty happy about that!

Fast forward to today. Let’s just say that I haven't had much luck with fruit in my area these past couple weeks. My local Kroger had red cherries on sale for $2.99/pound so of course, me being the cherry-holic that I am, took full advantage of this. I tasted one from the bunch that I picked, however once I got them home and tasted others I was thoroughly disappointed. What do you with a $9 bag of subpar red cherries? You make dark chocolate blood orange brownies and add them into the batter, of course! Did I mention that I am dieting and cannot eat these brownies? Yeah, I know.

After scouring many recipes I finally decided on using this recipe from Sweet Pea's Kitchen and I only made minor adjustments and one major one. The biggest change was adding the blood orange evoo in place of the vegetable oil. The minor changes were that I omitted almond extract because I didn't want it to conflict with the orange evoo, and  I omitted espresso powder because the Special Dark adds enough depth on its own. I used just a little more cocoa powder than the 1/3 cup in the original recipe.
 I also decided last minute to add chocolate ganache on top...as if they were not sinful enough! :) lol!

Ingredients:

1/2 cup Hershey Special Dark cocoa powder

1/2 cup boiling water

2 ounces semi sweet Ghirardelli chocolate chopped into small pieces

4 Tablespoons melted butter

1/2 cup blood orange evoo

2 large eggs

2 egg yolks

1 tsp. vanilla bean paste

2 cups sugar

1 3/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 tsp. salt

1/2 cup semi sweet Ghirardelli chocolate chips

2 cups fresh red cherries pitted and chopped 

Instructions:

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

2. Grease a 9 x 13 metal or glass pan with oil or butter.

3. In a large mixing bowl whisk together the cocoa powder and boiling water until it is smooth. Make sure the water is still hot because the heat will be used to melt the chopped chocolate.

4. Add the chopped chocolate and stir into the cocoa until it is completely melted and smooth.

5. Add in butter, oil, eggs, egg yolks and vanilla paste and whisk all ingredients in until it is well combined leaving no traces of egg or yolks.

6. Add sugar and whisk in until it is equally distributed and fully incorporated to your batter.

7. Stir in flour completely using a rubber spatula and be sure to scrape down the sides of the bowl when necessary.

8. Fold in chopped cherries.

9. Pour batter into your baking pan and place in the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes, or until the center is no longer runny when a toothpick is inserted.

10. Let cool for about 2 hours