A word of warning on Alton Brown recipes: they're bland as fuck. I have yet to make an Alton Brown recipe twice. Everything he does is micromanaged, ultra-precise and utterly devoid of pleasure. Nothing he does is bad per se; it's just underwhelming for the effort involved (and he's all about effort). The approach I've settled on for new recipes is to look it up on allrecipes and make the one with the most reviews. That way, at least, I know I'm making something utterly bomb-proof. I then modify it until it suits. They've got a turkey soup recipe, for example, that I've tripled the veggies, halved the veggies, left out the turkey, made it with vegetable or chicken broth, halved the butter, halved the cream, substituted milk for cream, substituted skim milk for cream, and accidentally forgotten the cream entirely and it still comes out good. these look pretty bomb-proof. You could skip the honey and substitute bourbon or amaretto for the vanilla and have it turn out all right. It's really going to come down to how good your cocoa powder is. Alton Brown, on the other hand, is firmly convinced it's all about sifting this and sifting that and whipping this and whipping that and fuck the ingredients, by the way. You can literally buy a box of Duncan Hines, stir some eggs into it with a fork, spray a pan with Pam and bake for 5 minutes too long and be fine. "Proof positive that technique is just as important as ingredients." Jesus fucking christ. thirteen "ounces" of sugar... or like 1.92 cups or some shit. I mean... okay, if your deity requires self-flagellation before the triple-beam balance, fuckin' go that way. But the weight of your brown sugar is going to drop by half based on how packed it is and how long it's been sitting in the pantry so I'd maybe save the effort.
I liked "Good Eats." I liked how he spent more time explaining how processes change the ingredients than any other show I'd seen or cookbook I had used at the time. But the guy is nothing if not obsessive. In an interview he described a painstaking quest of making biscuits exactly the same as his grandmother's. He took notes, he did experiments, he watched her make them, he mage her watch him make them, he used her own ingredients in her own kitchen, but they were never quite right. It wasn't until much later and after his grandmother died that the key came to him - he was kneading the dough the right number of times at the right speed, but he had young hands his grandmother had stiff arthritic hands. So he kneaded his biscuits with stuff hands and finally made his grandmother's biscuits. If he can tell the difference between stiff and flexible fingers for his biscuits, good for him. But he's got some issues - no clue where good enough is.
I, too, enjoyed Good Eats. He writes columns for Garden & Gun now and I enjoy them, too. But he is process-oriented, not results-oriented. This is why he loses his shit over "unitaskers" but measures his fucking ingredients with syringes. bitch do you know how many things you can do with a measuring cup My father loves to tell the story of my grandpa's grandma's cornbread. My grandma threw shit together in a pan and lobbed it in the oven. When my grandpa's union was on strike but my grandma was working as a telephone operator, it fell to my grandpa to make the cornbread so he asked for the recipe. Frustrated that none existed, he forced my grandma to throw shit in measuring cups for a week, averaged the results, and cooked it. According to my father, my grandmother's cornbread was occasionally great and occasionally shit but my grandfather's cornbread was consistently good, which is kind of the point of baking. It's certainly my recipe. Sometimes I even throw it together by handfuls. So I get the process-orientation. But not everything is a souffle. It's like audiophilia - just because he thinks he can tell the difference between stiff and flexible fingers doesn't mean he can.
From my experience a very robust process will always yield good results while a weak process will yield good results for some people some of the time much like you describe in grandmas recipe. What Alton does really well is show you a number of different cooking process/tricks that can be used from one recipe to the next. Even if you never cook the Alton recipe ever again you can borrow the process that Alton used and make a different or poorly documented recipe better. Between Kenji and Alton they have really come up with some great time saving/simplifications tricks that I used beyond their original recipes. But he is process-oriented, not results-oriented
My complaint about Alton Brown and "process" is that he overemphasizes how fragile that process is, not how robust it is. Like, he smash-zooms in and leers at you and says "DON'T. overstir" as if it'll cause Mogwai to turn into Gremlins or some shit. Compare to the guys at ATK - they make the recipe a dozen times and vary it and tell you what you need to worry about and don't and lo and behold, most of it you don't. Make no mistake - I think Alton Brown did a real service to cooks everywhere by demistifying a lot of the chemical and physical processes involved. But he's also got people convinced that unless you perform a religious amount of tweaking your food will suck. It amuses me to no end that if you ask the internet, the perfect roast chicken is Thomas Keller's, which is literally salt, pepper and trussing. But if you ask the internet, the perfect roast turkey is Alton Brown's, which takes two fuckin' days and $30 in brine. There's adoration, there's emulation, but there's no synthesis. Julia Child took on a roast chicken Season 1 Episode 1. Compared to Thomas Keller, she fuckin' mauls that thing. But you know what? You do it Julia's way, it cooks more evenly. I guess you don't get to charge $67 for it, though.
I didn't see this until this morning. You're right. Bland is a good way to put this recipe. The comments talked about it being like a flourless cake so I was expecting it to be dense which was fine but there wasn't any nuance really. it was also surprisingly bitter for having 13 ounces of sugar...