Decorating pen experiment with brownies and strawberries

I bought a decorating pen while wandering a kitchen store with a friend. It was inexpensive enough that I thought it worth for the price to try out. I am blown away with how awesome this pen is.

I decided to use it to decorate some brownies I brought to a pot luck. Below is the final product.

Strawberries in a brownie basket :)

How I did it

This one is pretty straight forward, but I'll describe what I did anyway.

The brownies are a store bought mix of dark chocolate.

The white ganache was left over from my previous experiment in ganache with my Chocolate v2.0 post. I took a small pan, put enough water in it to not over flow, and placed a bowl with the ganache in it. I then heat the pan on the stove*.

I sliced strawberries and put them in water with lime juice. The lime juice was for two reasons. First, to help preserve the strawberries because I didn't know if we'd actually eat the entire thing that night. Second, to brighten the flavor because they weren't very ripe.

Prepped and read to go

Here's the decorative pen I got.

Since I wasn't planning on saving the white ganache after I used it, I tried to use as much as possible. So I went for a crosshatch pattern.

The pen was amazing! Not only did things come out pretty smoothly (I need practice), but I quickly got the hang of it to control the flow to do a pretty decent job. The thing that amazed me most was how tight of a seal the plunger has. If you look at the pen in the above picture it has no ganache in it, but I had actually squeezed the leftover out before taking the picture. The inside used to have a bunch on the sides, but not after I squeezed it out!

I definitely plan to use this pen in the future. I kind of like the idea of using it to "write" with ganache and other sauces :)

*I don't think I'd recommend this, I honestly don't know if that bowl was really safe that way. But I wasn't planning on heating it for long, so I thought I'd try it. I was nervous the entire time :-/ Think I'll get a glass bowl that will fit that pan for the future.