As I said I was doing, I made two types of sweet and salty brownies, the original, and one using my all time favorite recipe, Maida Heatter's Palm Beach Brownies. Here is a
slideshow from start to finish of making them. I made a half recipe of each (only 7 tasters, and we DID eat other things! LOL), and I used just a half tsp of expresso powder in each, to equal the amount in their brownies in their first book, and didn't want that large amount in the PB recipe (2 1/2 tb) to make that a different factor in the tasting. I used 5 1/2 oz Guittard 72% chocolate in the original recipe, and 4 oz Ghirardelli unsweetened in the Palm Beach.
The Palm Beach recipe was definitely stiffer, though they both ended up stiffer by the time I spread the second half of batter over the caramel covered batter. This was because I was working with two, and they had time to stiffen up. This has happened before, too, so I found a trick that helped: I placed the caramel coated batter in the fridge for about 25 min, which stiffened up the caramel, and made it easier to spread the batter on it.
However, I did prepare them the same way, simply adding the sugar, eggs, and dried ing. to the melted butter and chocolate. The original recipe of the Palm beach calls for beating the eggs with the sugar until light and fluffy, then slowly beating the melted ing. in, then the dry ing., and this may have made the batter lighter and easier to spread. This does not make for an airy brownie, but it does give it a crust on top. But I figured the salt wouldn't stick to the crust as well, so I did them both this way.
Several of the tasters preferred the PB recipe, stating that it was more chocolatey, which it was, for sure. One said it was too sweet, and this was the only drawback I found - the extra sugar in the PB, 1 7/8c to 1c in the original, may have covered up the effect of the caramel. One other taster - another that is always trying to improve things, like myself - thought the same thing about the caramel being "somewhat lost" in the PB recipe. They were the most popular, but it can be improved.
Next time I may simply try the original with simply 8 oz of the unsweetened chocolate in place of the 11 oz bittersweet. Maybe I'll do this at Christmas, when most of these tasters will be there.