A Great Fudge Brownie
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Sometimes out of nowhere, after years of being completely cold toward them, I will crave a really good brownie.
Please keep the marijuana jokes to yourselves - I’m talking about the kind you give to kids at picnics and birthday parties and under ice cream sundaes. This craving happened last weekend. I made a pan and then realized I needed to write about it because you all seemed into the idea of knowing further details about this holy grail brownie recipe I claim to be concealing on my person. And then I needed to make another batch this weekend to take a good photo. And anyway. Let me pop any aspirational ego hovering about my head: this recipe is not my invention. It was shared to me, and now I get to share it with you.
Really, a brownie isn’t a reasonable craving for me to have; historically I don’t choose brownies as a dessert. If you were to set before me a lot of different sweet things, it would probably take me eighteen sweets down the line to decide I wanted to try for a brownie. And at that point I’d probably be so sick to my stomach I still wouldn’t want one.
It’s not that I don’t like brownies; it’s that my trust has been broken so many times by awful brownies that I’ve forgotten about the good ones.
I feel like brownies are one of those things we took for granted in childhood as always being pretty tasty, right? I don’t remember ever having had a cakey, crumbly, dry, pale brown excuse for a brownie in my whole childhood. I mean, did you? It feels strange to me that the majority of truly awful brownies I’ve suffered in my life have all been sampled above the age of twelve.
I have tried to figure out why this is so. Are we ruining them with excessive tinkering, adding fancy things to the batter that the brownie never asked for? This might be it. I’ve certainly seen plenty of recipes calling for espresso powder. I am unmoved by peppermint chips in brownies at Christmas, or a pumpkin cheesecake swirl in October, or the way you buried entire Oreo cookies in your pan of brownie batter before baking. (Though chop that up, Coldstone-style, into ice cream and then talk to me. I might bend.)
And please don’t swoop the poor brownie with an Elvis pompadour of chocolate frosting. Let me tell you: the only brownie that ought to be wearing frosting is a 90s Cosmic Brownie and it is allowed to have frosting because it’s such thin, weak frosting that you could hardly call it that anyway. It’s more like tacky glue for sticking on the sprinkles. If your brownie is a good brownie, adding chocolate frosting is like giving the Mona Lisa lip fillers: she isn’t meant to look like that.
Or again, maybe the trouble isn’t that we are trying to add too much to brownies as it is that some have tried to take away the things that make a brownie actually delicious. There has never been a simple sweet so thoroughly bastardized by health nuts as the brownie. People make them with avocado, or sweet potatoes, or black beans, or erythritol, or that godforsaken stevia that burns your throat and makes you sorry you took a second bite. Please don’t argue with me that those things taste decent. Maybe they taste like an okay square of something non-poisonous, but they don’t taste like a brownie. Anyway, I think that at the point you are fiercely mashing black beans into a sort of paste to mix with cocoa powder, you’re not making brownies; you’re making chocolate hummus which, yes, I have actually seen people put out at parties with fruit and cookies as if this wasn’t an insane thing to pretend to enjoy. Chocolate and beans. Mmmmm. Get in mah belly.
My siblings and I used to watch a lot of The Andy Griffith Show when we went over to my grandparents’ house. I still love the show and am so sorry that it’s only available on Paramount+, which is like the one streaming platform we don’t pay for or snitch off friends. One particular and very random scene sticks out in my mind whenever I think of brownies. In this specific episode, Barney Fife’s girlfriend (Thelma Lou) tries to cheer up a lovesick Opie whose crush at school is not going well. In this episode, “The Rivals,” Thelma Lou and Opie go into detail about their plans to make a pan of brownies. They spend an oddly long amount of time debating whether they want to put in pecans or not, and other small choices. To this day, that fictional pan of proposed brownies sounds like utopia. I don’t think I will ever have a brownie as good as I imagined Thelma Lou’s brownies to be. Maybe that also ruined me. Maybe this is all a coming of age story with a terse moral that I am too caught up in nostalgia to parse out for myself.
But this is not a newsletter about how brownies can nevermore be what they once were. Nor is this a hint that nearly the most delicious kind of brownie is a simple boxed brownie mix (I don’t know why, but they’re superior to any boutique brownie I have ever tasted). Nor is this an admission that while I have a dozen opinions on brownies themselves, I have always been good for a fingerful of brownie batter at any time of day or night. (Why are so many things better unbaked?) This is, rather, a triumphal entry of the One Recipe To Rule Them All, and I can’t take any credit for it.
Somehow or another we learned about it. We - my family and I - learned that our cousin had not only married a great girl, but that this girl came bringing with her an unassuming brownie recipe fit to shake the world. I can’t recall the exact moment that I met Amy’s brownies, but I think it was a pan of them that my sister had made according to Amy’s recipe. I was, quite simply, relieved and delighted. Relieved that the brownie I remembered did exist; delighted that it was now accessible to me outside increasingly distant memories.
When you have suffered many a terrible brownie, there is something wonderful about meeting a pure, unadulterated version. When the recipe was finally shared with me, I studied it. Was there something important and magical about this method?
But the answer is…no. This recipe is simple. It is not skimpy on pantry staples; there is twice as much sugar as there is flour. There is absolutely no rising agent apart from the eggs, and the eggs are added for richness, not lift. You are asked to include one spoonful of olive oil alongside a quantity of melted butter. I haven’t figured out how important that one spoon of oil is to the recipe, but I add it as instructed; it feels like the small toll paid to whatever benevolent person invented this recipe for the rest of us. How dare we question their choice?
And the brownies truly are flawless: not too thick, crisp on top, pure fudge in the center, hitting every note of bitter and sweet and chocolate and childhood that you need them to. Maybe your taste is not like mine, and you love an overworked, overstuffed, massively-rich and frosted brownie. Have fun! But if you’re looking to dial it back and recapture something…?
This is a recipe made without drama.
This is the brownie of freshly cut Saturday lawns, no internet, light-wash denim, and playing outside till dark in the summer. It’s a skinned-knees and scuffed sneakers-wearing brownie. It’s a “wait thirty minutes to swim” and a trampoline-fireworks brownie. This is a brownie that knows the Land Before Time movies, and had a Lion King pillowcase. This brownie fits into overall pockets, or in lunch boxes, or under a perfectly round scoop of vanilla ice cream. This is, in short, a true 1990’s brownie. A million thanks to Amy for bringing it into this family, and for sharing it freely with the world.
People say that nostalgia can be harmful, and if you get trapped there, it is. Some things were actually not great and we made the best of them because we couldn’t bear things not being okay. But I also believe that sometimes our kid-selves know better than the grownups. Something were pure, high-octane joy. I think sometimes what we remember as better-back-then is true. And one of the greatest joys as an adult is tapping back in to a part of your childhood that was just as good as you thought it was.
These brownies? They’re that. Make them and love them. No hidden beans or anything.
A Perfect Fudgy Brownie
1/2 cup butter, melted
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 1/8 cup granulated sugar
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons vanilla extract
1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/4 tsp. salt
Heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Line an 8”x8” square pan with parchment paper (so that you can lift out the brownies to cut when cool.)
In a large bowl, combine the melted butter, oil, and sugar. Mix by hand for one minute. Add the eggs and vanilla and mix for one minute longer.
Add the flour, cocoa powder, and salt to the egg mixture and mix well with a rubber spatula, careful not to leave clumps of dry mixture.
Pour into prepared pan, smooth top, and bake for 20-25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the center comes out with a few moist crumbs sticking to the sides.
Allow to cool in pan on a cooling rack, then lift parchment from pan and cut brownies into squares. Store in an airtight container for up to a week. These brownies are very moist so they retain their soft, fudgy interior for longer than expected.
Thank you! :) I tried these and they turned out great... only I overbaked them a bit. They'll be AMAZING next time!