I’m just going to come right out and say it… I’ve found the best brownie recipe. EVER! I know that is a bold claim to make and of course everyone has different tastes, but… This recipe really is the best I’ve ever made. It comes from a bakery in New York (Brooklyn to be exact) called Baked and I really just stumbled upon it by accident. I was looking for the recipe that I used to always use which was a heavily brown sugar-based brownie which was also fantastic, but when searching for a recipe that uses brown sugar, I stumbled across Brown Eyed Baker’s post of this recipe. You can betcha that I’m so glad I did! After making a batch of these brownies, I bought the recipe book that night. These guys are so clever! I highly recommend the rest of their book as well, called Baked: New Frontiers in Baking, they have lots of classics with a twist and it’s just a really great book to have in your collection. Like Brown Eyed Baker says in her post, it’s not cakey, it’s very moist and rich and tastes the best the day after it’s made. Really, you need this brownie in your life, so I won’t go on any more and let you make this and I bet you won’t want to stop eating it either! Happy baking!
The Baked Brownie
Ingredients
1 1/4 cups flour
1 tspn salt
2 Tbspn dark cocoa powder (not Dutch-processed)
330g dark chocolate bits
230g butter, cut into cubes
1 tspn instant espresso powder
1 1/2 cups sugar
1/2 cup packed brown sugar
5 eggs, at room temperature
2 tspn vanilla essence
Directions
- Preheat the oven to 180°C and butter the sides and bottom of a large rectangular or square baking pan. Line with baking paper.
- In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, salt and cocoa powder.
- Put the chocolate, butter and instant espresso powder (I used coffee oil which also worked well if you’re not an instant coffee drinker) in a large bowl and microwave it in short bursts (around 30 seconds) until the butter is completely melted. Add the sugars straight away and whisk until completely combined. The mixture should be room temperature.
- Add 3 eggs to the chocolate mixture and whisk until combined. Add the remaining eggs and whisk until combined. Add the vanilla and stir until combined. Do not overbeat the batter at this stage otherwise your brownies will be cakey instead of moist and yum!
- Sprinkle the flour mixture over the chocolate mixture and fold the flour into the chocolate until just a bit of flour is visible, using a rubber spatula (not a whisk).
- Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top. Bake in the centre of the oven for 30 minutes, rotating the pan halfway through the baking time, until a skewer inserted into the centre of the brownies comes out with only a few moist crumbs attached. Let the brownie cool completely, then lift out of the pan using the baking paper. Cut into squares and serve.
You can store these at room temperature in an airtight container for up to a week and they’re still good!
