Brownies from Yvette's: or, Of course I took away chocolate from a website with aliens

Let's talk about the early days of the internet. Or at least, the first days it was open to people who couldn't write computer code. Every house's mailbox was full of those AOL promotional CDs. (Seriously, AOL CDs were so inescapable that they spawned their own genre of craft projects.) The phrase "social media," if it existed, was still tightly locked up in conference rooms. No one had heard of "search engine optimization," and only coders used the word "algorithm."

Double Fudge Cream Cheese Brownies        Brownies: 1 cup butter or margarine 4 (1-ounce) squares unsweetened chocolate* 2 cups sugar 4 eggs 1 tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 2 tsp vanilla 1½ cups flour 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips        Filling: ¼ cup sugar 2 tbsp butter or margarine, softened 3 oz cream cheese, softened 1 tbsp all~purpose flour 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla         To make the brownies: Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9"x13" pan. To make the brownies, place the butter and unsweetened chocolate in a large saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until melted. Remove from heat and mix in the sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Then add vanilla, salt, and baking powder and beat very well. Mix in the flour, then stir in the chocolate chips. Set aside.         To make the filling: In a small bowl, beat the sugar, butter, cream cheese, and flour until light. Then beat in the egg and vanilla.         To assemble: Spread half of the batter into a pan. Spread the cream cheese mixture on top of it. The filling won't completely cover the brownie batter. Then spoon the remaining batter all over all, and spread it to cover. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. *If desired, you can substitute ¾ cups cocoa powder. Increase the butter to 1¼ cups. After melting the butter, stir it together with the sugar and cocoa. Then proceed with the rest of the recipe as written. Yvette's Bridal Formal

No one in those days worried about their "engagement stastics" or their "presence." Website layouts hadn't yet been standardized. When discussing webpages of the early modern era, it is contractually mandatory to deploy the phrase "it was like the wild west." Let it not be said that I neglected my cliched duty. 

This brings us to one of the ancient legends of terrible web design: Yvette's Bridal Formal. This bridal shop's website stretched the limits of 1990s web design as far as they could go. If you haven't heard of Yvette's Bridal Formal, this screenshot should suffice:

Yvette's website has long outlived the actual store, which permanently closed when a hurricane destroyed the building. But long after the splintered remains of the Florida strip mall that housed Yvette's were hauled to the city dump, enthusiasts and gawkers have kept the website preserved and alive.

Yvette's website is like electronic outsider art. At first, your eyes are overloaded by the jangly, crowded design. (For those who stayed awake in art history class, the phrase "horror vacui" comes to mind.) But after one goes through page after mesmerizing page, a certain internal logic becomes apparent. Yvette's website makes sense on its own terms. After a while, you almost appreciate the aesthetic consistency.

Apparently Yvette's website was the work of the owner's friend or relative (depending on who you ask). As the website got shared among people who had no interest in weddings or prom dresses, it became a bit of a liability for the people trying to actually run a business. Apparently whenever someone called the store to ask if they were really the people behind that wacky website, the clerk would hang up the phone with a cold "Thank you for calling Yvette's Bridal Formal."

Anyway, Yvette's has recipes on its webpage if you look past the alien art, personal manifestos, and conspiracy theories. Most of the recipes look ordinary, especially compared to the rest of the site. Perhaps that is why these brownies wedged themselves into my mind.

Further research indicates that this recipe comes directly from the Land O Lakes website, but that is neither here nor there.

We have previously encountered cheesecake encased in chocolate cake. Even when we got that misguided recipe to work, it wasn't as good as it sounded. But cheesecake and brownies seemed like a better match.

The recipe starts by melting your brownie ingredients in a saucepan. At first I wondered why anyone would do this on a stovetop instead of the microwave. Then I realized that by doing the brownies in a pot, we are saving the mixing bowl for the cheesecake. After all, most people don't have multiple mixers on the countertop. But because sometimes you get lucky at thrift shops, I do! And they came with microwave-safe bowls!

After finishing the brownie batter, it was time to make the cheesecake. Like most cheesecakes, it was a simple matter of siccing an electric mixer on the ingredients. We were soon ready to get this into a pan and bake it. The recipe notes that the top layer of brownie batter "will not entirely cover cream cheese mixture," but I didn't have that problem. Instead, the cheesecake didn't cover the batter in the first place.

Our second round of brownie batter was a bit tricky to coax into place, but it tasted too good to care.

The brownies leveled themselves off in the oven, so my ineptitude with a rubber spatula proved harmless. And the brownies had developed that perfect crisp, shiny, crackly top.

Upon cutting the brownies, we found that the cream cheese looked a little unnervingly aerated. It was almost leavened like bread. I worried that I had ruined a batch of brownies with an intrusion of Dormeyer cheesecake.

When we cut the brownies, my camera decided to actively sabotage me. Every picture I tried to take looked like this.

I haven't had such rotten luck since I tried to take pictures of the marzipan-stuffed brownies. But you can take my word that they were really good. Consider the bad pictures as proof of how good the recipe is. The brownies didn't last long enough for me to try again.

Even though there were already hints that I should make these again, I don't like a recipe that exists solely for a gimmick-- even if said gimmick is cheesecake. I wanted to know if the brownies were any good without the help. We all know that cream cheese icing can fix almost any failure, and these brownies have a baked-in injection of it. So I carefully cut out an edge piece (you will recall that the cream cheese didn't reach the edges), and... the brownies are really good. They're almost as good as the recipe we brought home from Canada. So, we at A Book of Cookrye recommend two things: making this recipe, and exploring the weirdness that is Yvette's Bridal Formal.