brownie points

i've learnt this week how important it is to kiss. not so much the lip puckering action, but simply that it’s important to keep-it-simple-stupid. it's a lesson i've learnt after a week of brownie experimenting and subjecting various lovely ladies at slavedrivers inc. and other long suffering friends to a horde of not quite successful brownies, involving at one stage a rather suspicious looking white chocolate and matcha affair that when asked to guess what flavour it was, my boss said the green brownie tasted of seaweed.

so it's back to basics. this basic brownie recipe from Mark Bittman's book “How to Cook Everything” is as simple as baking brownies gets. it produces a lovely moist, dense and gooey brownie - and that’s probably all you should want a brownie to be really.


2 ounces unsweetened chocolate
4 ounces butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
½ cup flour
pinch of salt
½ teaspoon vanilla extract

melt chocolate and butter in a bowl set over boiling water and stir till smooth. mix in sugar and beat eggs in one at a time. fold in flour, salt and vanilla extract. bake in a greased tin which has been lined with foil in a preheated oven at 180C for 20-25 minutes till just barely set in the middle. cool completely before cutting and eating. patience is a virtue because this brownie improves with being chilled overnight in the fridge. mark bittman calls for an 8-inch square pan, but if you’re much too lazy to go scavenging for one as I was, a loaf tin works just as well, and it produced a deeper brownie, which meant an increased brownie surface area in each slice.