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| Here’s my first attempt at Tetris shaped brownies! |
I was charged with an interesting challenge tonight. Tom somehow stumbled across this picture of brownies that were shaped like Tetris pieces (and appropriately colored/frosted), and asked if I would make him Tetris brownies. Um, sure. I mean, why not? I didn’t really have anything planned for tonight, so I decided to give it a go. I looked up the original post from the picture he found to see if it had any instructions or helpful hints, and it did have a basic “how-to”. You can read that post here.
I decided I wanted to make the brownies from scratch. Namely because I had finally found a good recipe for them a while back and haven’t made them since. After some searching, I dug up the recipe I had liked — it’s from Allrecipes.com and you can view it here. They actually come out as real brownies — not too cake-y and not too fudge-y. Just right.
Anyways, I took a hint from the how-to guide and decided to bake the brownies in a 9×13 pan rather than the 8×8 that the recipe calls for. The thinner brownies make for easier cutting. While the brownies were cooking/cooling, I colored the frosting. I ended up just using a can of vanilla frosting from the store. I put a scoop of it into seven different bowls for the seven colors I would need. I had to decide which version of Tetris I would base my tetriminos (Tetris pieces) off of, since the colors vary. I ended up going with the “Tetris Company”/”Tetris Party” colors (thank you for the easy display of options, Wikipedia), and I’m glad I did because I think it was the easiest color scheme to make. I bought a multi-pack of food coloring that came with red, blue, yellow, and green (apparently people have a hard time making green??). Most of the colors were pretty straightforward. The only one that was a bit tricky was cyan. I didn’t want it to end up just a lighter version of blue, so I did a few drops of blue and one drop of green to give it a little more of that aqua look.
Once the brownies had cooled (or at least had cooled enough for me to handle), I cut out my pieces. Now, I am not good at cutting brownies in to squares, so this was a bit of a challenge for me. I’m also visually-spatially challenged, meaning I couldn’t just figure out what pieces to cut as I went. So I made a sort of grid on the rectangle of brownies by lightly scratching the surface with a toothpick. Once all of the squares were visible, I could more easily figure out how to cut the shapes. I did one of each of the seven shapes first, just to be sure I got them all. Then I just did whatever seemed to fit best for the remainder. I used an extra sharp knife to cut them, and a small spatula to pry them out (also, be sure to grease the bottom of the pan really well before baking; this helped a lot). Some of my pieces did fall apart a bit, but fortunately frosting doubles as a good glue!
Once I had the pieces laid out on a platter, I referenced my cheat sheet and frosted each piece accordingly. I used the edge of my spatula to make the lines separating the individual “blocks” within each tetrimino. Overall, it was a fun challenge and the brownies turned out pretty good! The shapes were not perfect, but not bad considering my skill level – ha!
However, now I’m in the mood to play Tetris…who wants to play Tetris Party with me?? Be warned: I totally dominated last time we played with my extended family 🙂
At the Water's Edge 
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