Second-Stab Saturday: De-icing the Allegedly Best Brownies!

We at A Book of Cookrye couldn't help thinking about the brownie recipe that claimed to be better than any other we could possibly have. The brownie batter had been too delicious to possibly taste as disappointing as the brownies had been. The more we thought about it, the more it seemed the sugar overload the recipe said to ice them with had so successfully hidden the taste of everything in the brownies except the baking soda and salt. And so, we present a a very simple alteration to a recipe: leaving off the icing!

Look at how gooey and nearly-black with chocolate the brownies are! Who wouldn't want to make a recipe like this again?

Brownies ½ c sugar 2 tbsp butter 2 tbsp water 1⅓ c chocolate chips 2 eggs ⅔ c flour ¼ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp salt 1 tsp vanilla ¾ c nuts, if desired Heat oven to 325°. Grease an 8" square or 9" round pan. You can use a 9" square if you like them a little thin. Mix sugar, water, and butter in a saucepan, bring to a boil. Remove from heat. Immediately stir in the chocolate chips with a spoon. When only a few lumps of unmelted chocolate remain, it may be easier to use a whisk, but if you use a whisk at first you'll just get a big wad of chocolate chips in the middle of the wires that won't melt or break apart. Switch to a whisk and beat in the eggs until all is smooth. When thoroughly mixed, beat in the baking soda, salt, and vanilla. Lastly, add the flour, beating out any lumps. Stir in the nuts if you want them. Pour into the pan and bake 20-30 minutes, or until a knife or toothpick in the center comes out with no liquid batter on it. (They are perfect when there is still stuff that clings to whatever you're testing the pan with but nothing runny is in the center.) If they sink while cooling, don't worry about it. Recipe easily doubles for a 9x13 pan. Cooking with the Families of Saint Peter's Community, 1988 (contributor: Wana Halbach)

As a recipe note (because you owe it to yourself to try these), while it is easier to mix these and beat out any lumps of unmixed things with a whisk than a wooden spoon, you probably shouldn't use a whisk to try and beat the chocolate into the boiling syrupy stuff. This will happen.

Instead of melting into the pot of stuff, the chocolate chips formed a wad inside the whisk and would not come out no matter how hard I bashed it into the side of the pot. So yeah, use a spoon to get the chips melted (or at least mostly so), and then get out a whisk.
As noted the last time we made these, you have what looks like fudge right after you've got the chocolate and the syrupy stuff mixed together. You can even take it out of the pot and shape it like chocolatey clay. As a Book of Cookrye experiment, we decided to see if we could make it into homemade chocolate truffles. So, we took a small ball of the chocolate stuff out of the pot and coated it in cocoa powder.

This was then left to sit out while we got the brownies mixed and into the oven. However, while the chocolate stuff in the pot did taste amazing, there were signs that we may not have accidentally found a delightful and easy truffle recipe. The cocoa powder which is supposed to both keep the aspiring truffles from sticking together (and also add a lovely dose of unadulturated chocolate to the outside) was failing to do so.

Within fifteen minutes, the "truffles" were leaving skid marks on the counter. It was a shame the truffle idea failed because they tasted delicious.

So the recipe did not produce chocolate truffles. That's all right, it never claimed to be a recipe for chocolate truffles. It is a recipe for brownies, and as a brownie recipe it is amazing, delicious, and divoon.