Instant brownie mix is for wussies.

This recipe makes the best brownies ever.

Note that above, where it says "chocolate", it means chocolate. If you make these brownies with "cooking chocolate", "chocolate style cake covering", or, gods forbid, Hershey bars, then things will not go well for you.

  1. Preheat oven to 325°F / 163°C / gas mark 3.
  2. Combine flour, baking soda and salt
  3. Place butter, sugar and water in small saucepan; bring just to boil. Remove from heat.
  4. Add 150g chocolate and vanilla extract. Stir until chocolate melts and mixture is smooth. Transfer to large bowl.
  5. Add eggs, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
  6. Gradually blend in flour mixture.
  7. Stir in chocolate chips and nuts.
  8. Spread into greased 9-inch square baking pan.
  9. Bake at 325°F / 163°C / Gas mark 3 for 30 minutes
  10. Cut when cold.
Chocolate Syrup Brownies

1/2 cup butter or margarine
1 cup sugar
4 eggs
1 16 ounce can (1 1/2 cups) chocolate syrup
1 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup chopped walnuts
Quick Chocolate Glaze

Quick Chocolate Glaze: Combine 2/3 cup sugar, 3 tablespoons milk, and 3 tablespoons butter. Heat till boiling; boil 30 seconds. Stir in 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate pieces till melted.

Grease a 13x9x2 inch baking pan. Beat butter for 30 seconds; add sugar and beat till fluffy. Add eggs and beat just till blended. Stir in syrup, then flour. Stir in walnuts. Turn into pan. Bake in a 350° oven for 30 - 35 minutes. Cool slightly; pour Quick Chocolate Glaze atop. Cool. Cut into bars. Makes 32.

Blonde Brownies

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 cup butter or margarine
2 cups packed brown sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1 cup chopped walnuts

Grease a 13x9x2 inch baking pan. Combine flour, baking powder, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Melt butter; remove from heat. Stir in sugar. Add eggs and vanilla; stir till blended. Stir dry ingredients and walnuts into sugar mixture. Spread in pan. Bake in a 350° oven 20 - 25 minutes. Cut into bars while warm. Makes 48.

Brownies to Die From

I found this recipe in a package of Hershey's cocoa. Its original name was "Deep Dish Brownies", but I don't think that name does them justice. On the stained slip of paper, between the title and the list of ingredients, is a question, in italics:

Has a brownie ever been too rich, too thick or too moist?

I think not, my friends.

It is ridiculously easy to make these brownies. You will need:

Blend melted butter, sugar, and vanilla in a mixing bowl. Add eggs; beat well with spoon. Combine flour, cocoa, baking powder and salt; gradually add to egg mixture until well blended. Spread in greased 8-inch square baking pan. Bake at 350 degrees (F) for 40 to 45 minutes or until brownie begins to pull away from edges of pan. Cool; cut into squares.

Share and enjoy!

* Of course the recipe calls for Hershey's cocoa, but you need not feel constrained by this fact. I have made these brownies with many different kinds of cocoa - Hershey's, Penzeys, Nestle, Scharffen-Berger, Ah!Laska. They are all different, and all good.


liontamer says Hey, I made these the other day for the staffs of my school and my Board of Education. They all swooned and demanded the recipe.

Curiously chocolatey Choc-Chip Brownies (Makes 15) Ingredients: 110g butter
50g unsweetened chocolate
2 eggs (beaten)
225g granulated sugar
50g plain flour (sifted)
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
110g chopped nuts
100g Chocolate chips

Pre-heat the oven to gas-mark 4, 350 degrees farenheit, 180 degrees celsius.
Grease a baking tin measuring approx 7 x 11 inches and line with greaseproof paper.

Firstly melt the butter and chocolate together in the top of a double saucepan or in a basin placed above simmering water (break the chocolate into small pieces). When this is done stir in the other ingredients and pour the mixture into the baking tin.

Bake in the oven for roughly half an hour, until the centre of the mixture feels springy (don't over cook it, it will firm up as it cools).
Sprinkle some more chocolate chips onto the mixture straight after you remove it from the oven and leave the mixture to cool for a few minutes then cut it into pieces and transfer them to a wire rack to finish cooling.

Vegan brownies

I have no idea how well these resemble the real McCoy, but they're tasty in their own right. And they contain chocolate, so I guess that's enough reason... The simplicity of preparation might be ideal for making them with kids. As the batter also doesn't contain any egg, anyone is free to lick the bowl clean.

2 cups all-purpose flour
2 cups sugar (including some vanilla sugar)
1 cup (dutch processed) cocoa powder
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 cup oil
1 cup water

Mix the solid ingredients together before pouring in the liquid ingredients. Mix into a nice batter. Pour the batter into an oiled tin (approx. 8x8 in.) and bake in an oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit for about 30 minutes, or until a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Optional ingredients could be (upto) 1 cup of chopped nuts or some chili powder (I use 1/2 teaspoon, but as either the strength of your chili powder or your mileage may vary, try how much you like for yourself).

Ingredients:

  • 110g butter
  • 130g Lindt 70% chocolate
  • 4 eggs
  • 100g flour
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 220g nuts (I use pecans or walnuts)
  • 450g sugar
    • 100g molassas sugar
    • 200g dark demerera
    • 75g maple syrup
    • 75g white cane sugar
And also:
  • Baking tin approximately 1442 inches in area (30cm x 30cm) and a few inches deep.
  • a large bowl, a glass mixing bowl and a saucepan with a smaller diameter
  • A wooden spoon and a sharp knife
  • Greaseproof paper, 1 sheet thereof
Instructions:
  • Preheat oven to 180oc
  • Grease tin with butter and line with a big sheet of greaseproof paper.
  • Melt butter and chocolate, both broken into bits, in a glass bowl above a pan of boiling water.
  • Mix everything together in the big bowl, mmm
  • Pour it into the tin, stick tin in oven, leave for about 30 minutes, have a check. If it's browning nicely, starting to pull away from the edges of the tin and you can stick a knife in it and pull it out again cleanly and easily, it's probably done. The mix will probably still be a bit gooey, that's fine, as it cools it firms up.
  • If it's not ready, give it another 5/10 minutes and check again. The cooking time really will depend on your oven, and does not scale linearly based on volume of brownie production.
  • Leave it to cool in the tin for a while, then take it out, leave it to cool a bit further, chop into bits of an appropriate size.

Starsong's absolutely fantastic brownies

I have made these for my neighbors, and they're always asking when I'm going to bake these again. They're very similar to the Deep Dish Brownies a few writeups up, but I've added a few variations.

You'll need:

1-1/2 cup white sugar
3/4 cup unsalted butter (1-1/2 sticks)
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 large eggs
1/2 tsp salt (option)
1-1/2 tsp vanilla
2 squares bitter baking chocolate and/or 1/2 cup cocoa powder

Method:
Preheat oven to 350F. Grease an eight-inch brownie pan with butter or oil of choice.
melt together baking chocolate and butter. I use the microwave, and with my older one it only takes about one minute on full power.
Add this mix to the sugar, beat well. Add in the vanilla and eggs, beating well to combine.
Mix together the baking powder, flour, salt and cocoa powder. Incorperate this into the wet ingredients, until a batter is formed.

Now here comes the fun. You could bake these as is, or you can use my variations, or make your own.

Add melted caramel to the top. Cover with bits of almond or pecans.
Layer this with caramel and pecans or chocolate chips, making turtle brownies.
Add in cream cheese if desired, but layer it between the rest of the batter.

Once you've gotten your masterpiece assembled, toss it in the oven for forty to forty-five minutes, or until a toothpick comes out clean.

Cool, cut into squares and watch them disappear.

Note: these brownies are not easy to cut cleanly. I always have trouble.

I've been putting this together in my head for about a decade, and I'm finally ready to take a stab at it.

People take brownies for granted a lot, especially given how many mixes are out there. 

Certainly, the myth that brownies are simply a cake with the wrong leavening is a lie that needs to be eliminated post haste.

Brownies that are like cake aren't brownies, they're a bad cake. Real brownies should be dense and fudgey, they should be sticky and gooey, and they should go great heated up with ice cream or whipped cream. There's a density, an intensity, required by them.

In fact, the very belief that there should be leavening in brownies is a misnomer. This may be regarded as an opinion, but it's the right one.

If you were to graph brownies across three axis, there would be three intersecting qualities which really define the brownie. They are as follows:

Real custard, at its heart, is a mixture of sugar/syrup and eggs, brought together in a slurry and then baked for a reasonable time until they set.

Ganache is a blend of chocolate and butter or cream.

When you bring custard and ganache together, you get a sort of pudding or mousse, depending on the quantities you've brought together.

When you incoprorate flour, whether wheat, rice, or other, you are essentially introducing a factor which can bring air into the equation, sort of a lattice work which brings size and airiness to the overall result.

Lisa Yokelson's "Essence of Chocolate" brownies, which I've used as my "go-to" base for about a decade now (see Cream Cheese Brownies) is a stick and a half of butter and four ounces of unsweetened chocolate, and then a cup and a half of flour with nearly three tablespoons of cocoa incorporated, as well as four eggs and 2 cups of sugar, preferably vanilla infused.

These brownies are a dense, flavorful, but relatively dry offering. It's much more like the legendary unrisen cake, and makes a great base for other deserts, or something to use as a combo to mix with chips or flavoring. It's a pallette in and of itself, rather than the main dish.

On the other hand, Elisabeth Prueitt's base brownies from the Tartine bakery book make chocolate the main affair. With a full pound of chocolate to the stick and a half of butter, the chocolate completely takes over the picture. Additionally, it ups to 5 eggs, pushing the limits of what custard can be in this dish. For best results, the brownies literally have to be allowed to sit for a day, much like fine ganache, so that the flavor can really develop, at which point the full texture and flavor of the gooey, fudgey brownies as a canvas for the brownies really come through. There's no point in putting other things into this sort of brownie...the texture and flavor as they are are precisely the point.

So we have to ask, not only what it's worth to us to have good brownies, but precisely what are we trying to accomplish? Is this just some easy fallen cake dish with cocoa powder that we're making because there's nothing left in the cupboard and we need something sweet on a friday night? Are we trying to make something truly overwhelming, fudgy, and dark which will blow our minds and drive us to further heights and depths of exploration?

I certainly know what I'm exploring.

...

Prueitt Brownies:

3/4 C unsalted butter

1 lb. bittersweet chocolate, chopped (It's easier to just buy a bag or two of chips, honestly.)

3/4C + 2Tbsp AP flour

5 large eggs

2 Cups light brown sugar

1/2tsp. salt

1tsp. vanilla

Preheat oven the oven to 350. Butter a 9x13 glass baking dish.

Get a saucepan and melt the butter in it. Remove it from the heat, and add the pound of chocolate (I usually just use chocolate chips, as it's less work. Nestle has some nice 53% chips right now, though Ghiradelli is of course always superb with their 65% bittersweet. Stir, it usually all melts together pretty quickly.

Sift the flour into a small mixing bowl.

In a mixing bowl, combine the eggs, sugar, salt and vanilla. Using a mixer fitted with the whisk, beat on high until the mixture thickens and becomes pale in color. Using a rubber spatula, fold in cooled chocolate. Add the flour and fold it in quickly, but gently with the spatula so that you don't deflate the air. (this doesn't always entirely work out, and, really, they're just fine dense, they just don't bake the same way, and you'll probably have to bake them longer. Also: I succumbed to the temptation to use dark brown sugar instead of light brown. I do not suggest this, it's insanely intense. The light brown is good enough.)

Pour the batter into the prepared dish and smooth the top. If you're using nuts, evenly distribute them across the batter. Bake until the top looks slightly cracked and feels soft to the touch. about 25 minutes. (or closer to 40 if there isn't much air in them) Let cool completely.

A word about this brownie: It's quite gooey, and it really, really improves in flavor if you let it sit for a day or two before eating.

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