Fudgy Cocoa Brownies

This year, I didn’t ask the Doctor what he wanted for his birthday cake.  I wanted brownies, and I hadn’t blogged about them yet.  Guess what he got :)

This is my go-to recipe for brownies because:

1. It only uses butter and cocoa powder (which I always have around) instead of needing to melt chocolate (which I don’t have around because I’d just eat it).
2. It totally has the laziest way to use baking paper ever.

Ingredients

Recipe from Alton Brown

226 grams unsalted butter, melted
4 large eggs
1 cup sugar, sifted
1 cup brown sugar, sifted
1 1/4 cups cocoa powder, sifted (Use the best quality you can get your hands on, I use Callebaut.  Available in Melbourne here and here.)
1/2 cup flour, sifted
1/2 teaspoon kosher or sea salt
2 teaspoons vanilla extract (I use homemade brandy-based extract)

Equipment

Baking tray
LOTS of baking paper
Stand mixer (optional)

Melt the butter.  I use a combination microwave/oven for baking, and I ALWAYS forget to melt the butter.  It needs to cool down anyway, so do this first.

Pre-heat the oven to 150C.

Cut a ridiculously huge piece of baking paper, much larger than your baking tray in both width and length.  The original recipe recommends greasing and flouring the baking tray, but with this much butter, I have never had a problem with sticking.

Whip the eggs until they are fluffy.  This will probably give you enough time to…

Measure both the sugars and de-clump them as best you can.

Add the sugars to the eggs, and continue mixing while you…

Sift the dry ingredients together.  I used Maldon sea salt which has huge crystals, so I crumbled them up a little bit first.

Add the dry ingredients and the butter to the egg-sugar mixture in alternating lots.  Make sure you turn the whisk on sloooowly, as cocoa powder makes a bigger mess than flour if it gets flung about the kitchen.

Stir until the batter just comes together (scraping the sides if you need to).  It’s okay if it’s a bit fluffy now, but you don’t want to walk away from this.

Not that you could walk away. #hellogorgeous

Pour the batter into your paper sling, and smooth out the surface, pushing the batter into the corners of the tray.  If you are less lazy than me, you could trim the paper to fit the tin more closely.  It’s pretty difficult to manoeuvre the paper while you’re pouring the batter, so make sure it’s somewhat centred before you start pouring.

Bake for 40-45 minutes.  The toothpick test will probably fail since this is so fudgy, but the top of the brownie should have a bit of a crust (not jiggly at all).

And yes, brownie corners are absolutely the best bit.  But I wouldn’t use a gimmicky edge pan because I wouldn’t be able to do my lazy sling trick.  They’re chef’s privilege :)

Here’s the printable!