Brownie Bliss

Last week I finally made these brownies. I've been eyeing the recipe for quite a while but never found the time to actually try it out. Since we had a potluck to attend, I thought this might be a good opportunity to try it out and be able to sample the product without eating the entire pan.

Chewy Brownies
From Cook's Illustrated (with minor adaptations)

1/3 cup cocoa (the darker, the better)
1 1/2 tsp instant espresso (optional)
1/2 cup plus 2 Tbsp boiling water
2 oz unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, melted
1/2 cup plus 2 Tbsp vegetable oil
2 large eggs
2 large egg yolks
2 tsp vanilla extract
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 3/4 cups all-purpose flour
3/4 tsp salt
6 oz bittersweet chocolate, cut into 1/2-inch pieces

1. Adjust oven rack to lowest position and heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease pan or line with foil and grease foil (for easier cutting later).
2. Whisk cocoa, espresso powder and boiling water together in large bowl until smooth. Add unsweetened chocolate and whisk until chocolate is melted. Whisk in melted butter and oil. Add eggs, yolks, and vanilla and continue to whisk until smooth and homogeneous . Whisk in sugar until dissolved. Add flour and salt and mix with rubber spatula until combined. Fold in bittersweet pieces chocolate pieces.
3. Scrape batter into prepared pan and bake until toothpick inserted halfway between edge and center comes out with just a few moist crumbs attached, 30 to 35 minutes. Transfer to a wire rack and cool 1 1/2 hours.
4. If pan was lined foil, lift foil and brownies from pan and return to wire rack to cool completely. Cut into 2-inch squares and serve.

Makes 24 brownies.

The ingredients (minus the oil since I forgot to set it out and the espresso powder since I wanted these to be kid friendly).
This is a suggestion from Cook's Illustrated that worked great! To finely chop the chocolate, use a serrated knife. Instead of chopping, it's almost like you're finely grating it.

The cocoa, boiling water, and melted chocolate. Anything with this much chocolate has to turn out good, right? A note on cocoa: the original recipe called for dutch processed cocoa; I couldn't find that in our grocery store so I used the Hershey's Special Dark cocoa and it worked great.

Mixing in the flour.

I'm really bad at chopping chocolate. I either have way too big of chunks (because I'm too lazy to spend the time) or it crumbles into those super-fine shreds seen above. Since this recipe called for chocolate chunks (and I was feeling impatient), I decided to try a different tactic. We got out our Pampered Chef chopper and my magical kitchen elves pounded away. This still wasn't probably the best tactic and resulted in some pretty small chocolate chunks (but was way faster!). Next time around I may just buy chocolate chunks to save myself the time and effort. I'm a wuss like that.

I ran out of foil or I would have tried the foil method. It sounds like it would make getting pretty brownies so much easier. But who am I kidding? Nobody eats brownies because they're pretty.

The finished brownie. The original recipe calls for letting the brownie cool completely before cutting. Being that I'm impatient and chronically unprepared, I didn't have time to let these cool completely before cutting into them. As a result, the brownies were pretty sticky and did not cut up nicely. They still tasted fantastic though. This is by far the best homemade brownie recipe I've tried. The brownie had a lot of chocolate taste and a wonderful, chewy consistency (unlike the somewhat dry versions I've tried before). Pretty or not, this recipe gets a gold star from me!