Baking Feature: Double Chocolate Brownies

Tonight I baked my mother’s specialty: Double Chocolate brownies. These things are amazing, and to say that they’re delicious is almost silly in its lack of understanding. These transcend delicious; they take you to a secret place made of sunshine and happiness where you are enveloped in warm gooiness and cradled lovingly; your taste buds will begin to shun other food for its disappointing inability to compare.

And they’re not pot brownies. I want to make that clear.

I wanted to celebrate Friday with my coworkers, and my criteria for what to make were simple: I had to already have the ingredients because I had to take the rabbit to the vet and I’m wasn’t stopping at a grocery store and leaving him in the car. Since my mother and I both bake relatively regularly, there were probably a ton of things that I could have made with what we had on hand (since anything I lacked she probably had upstairs. We live in the in-law suite in the basement which is convenient when you run out of butter). Somehow I just felt that it was a brownie kind of Friday, so that’s what I decided to make.

I admit that lately I’ve been making box mix brownies which, if I didn’t know this recipe, would be acceptable (they’ve all been delicious). But I did not have my box mix in my pantry to tempt me into taking the easy way out, and my coworkers were very glad about that. Making them from scratch is definitely slower since it takes several bowls and a little time on the stove rather than throwing everything in one big bowl and pouring it into a pan; in the end, though, I think it was worth the extra effort and dirty dishes.

Unfortunately, since these are my mother’s specialty and the closest I think we have to a family recipe, I will not post it here. The pictures show you a good bit of what’s in them, and below I’ve linked to a recipe that is similar and will probably give you an acceptable close result (and apparently is safe to send to troops in the desert, so you could do that). For me, the biggest key is to reduce the cooking time by about 10 minutes. I don’t like cakey brownies- we already have a dessert that is cakey; it’s called cake. A brownie should be gooey and sticky and fudgy, and if you bake these for the full time, you’ll bake them past that ooey-gooey perfection. Obviously make sure you bake them long enough to remove any salmonella risks, though. But just barely.

This time around, I was doing dishes and not paying attention to my timer, so I baked them about 3 minutes longer than I intended to, and they suffered a little for it (but don’t tell my coworkers, because they had no idea what they almost had).

Recipe from VeryBestBaking.com

-Aly