Chocolate of The Day: Deep Dish Brownies

Though I enjoy cooking, I have never been much of a baker. Sticky, precise ingredients mixed with being lactose intolerant takes a lot of the fun out of it for me, but I do make some pretty great brownies. That’s my kind of baking — just a bit of mixing, pour the batter in pan, and it’s into the oven. And as I discovered the last time I made them, my recipe holds up rather well when one makes a mistake.

My husband started out being the one who cooked more often, early in our marriage. I was known to mess up boxed mac and cheese, but he’s always been quite capable in the kitchen. For his birthday, ten years ago, his mother sent him an AllRecipes cookbook, and at the time, I was pregnant with our daughter. In short, I was very, very hungry, and this cookbook (along with the website) taught me how to make what I wanted. And on one of those days, I really wanted brownies.

The original recipe for Deep Dish Brownies can be found here, but since I no longer have an 8″x8″ square pan, my current version uses a 7″x10″ glass dish. The cooking time stays the same, depending on your oven’s quirks. Let’s get to it:

Ingredients

• 3/4 cup butter/margarine, melted OR 2/3 cup + 1 tbsp. vegetable oil
• 1 1/2 cups white sugar
• 1 1/2 tsp. vanilla extract
• 3 eggs
• 3/4 cup all-purpose flour
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1/2 tsp. baking powder
• 1/2 tsp. salt
• 1 cup+ semi-sweet chocolate chips (optional)

My daughter had asked me to make these for her class Valentine’s Day party, and so she was helping me with the mixing. Because I was talking to her and because we were trading off on who added what ingredients to the bowl, I realized that our extra-thick batter meant that we’d accidentally doubled the amount of flour in the recipe — 1 1/2 cups instead of 3/4!

I said, “Well, you’re going to get chocolate something for tomorrow.”

Directions

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F (175 degrees C).

Mix together the butter/margarine/oil with the sugar and vanilla extract. Add the eggs one at a time and stir until evenly mixed.

Add the flour and mix thoroughly, then mix in the rest of your dry ingredients. Add chocolate chips last, if you’re using them.

Pour the batter into a greased pan and bake for 40-45 minutes, or until the edges of the brownies begin to slightly pull away from the sides of the pan.

So how did our slightly abnormal brownie recipe turn out? Not too shabby, as it happens. The end result was a less chocolate-y brownie that was thicker in substance, but lighter in texture. My mother thought it tasted a bit like the brownies one gets in restaurants when they are served topped with ice cream. So while I wouldn’t necessarily make them this way regularly, I was pleased that they turned out well for my daughter’s classroom party. In the past, I’ve also added walnuts to the mixture instead of chocolate chips, and those have also tasted good.

Short of buying pre-mixed boxed ingredients, one can hardly find an easier recipe for brownies. If a lazy baker like me can do it, so can you. Enjoy!