My Best-Ever Brownies

And why I don't believe in "fudge-y" brownies

This post and recipe have been updated!

Pride in NYC is always a tightrope act for me: go out and be disappointed by unrealistic high expectations, heat, exhaustion, treacherous social interactions — or stay home and watch Pride unfold through everyone else’s rose-colored Instagram Stories. I don’t think I quite struck that balance this year (I am very exhausted) but I still spent time with queer friends I love and that’s always better than sitting at home wondering what you’re missing. Whether or not it was Pride where you are, I hope your weekend was fabulous.

One great thing: for the first time in a long time I didn’t bake or work at all this weekend. I had the recipe for these brownies ready to go last week, but I know people aren’t opening emails at 4 p.m. on a Friday, so you’re getting them now! This is a recipe for my wonderful paid subscribers, but you can check out my thin, chewy brownies on easygayoven.com, as well. Read more about this week’s recipe below!

EGO Recommends

📺 TV: John Early: Now More Than Ever on HBO Max
John Early brings his zany, triple-ironic, can’t-tell-if-he’s-serious style to this meta special where the character of John Early the comedian is just as ridiculous, vapid and narcissistic if not worse than the millennials he rips jokes about. Interspersed with musical numbers from Britney to Donna Summer, this special made me cackle alone in my living room.

🎧 Music: Madison Rose
Last week, I had the pleasure of attending a Pride event hosted by my friend’s organization Queer Capita at Elsewhere in Brooklyn. So many excellent queer performers, and I was especially obsessed with up-and-coming pop icon (in my opinion) Madison Rose, whose songs are like all the best parts of 2010’s pop — drawing comparisons in my mind to Kesha, Katy Perry and Kim Petras. Powerhouse voice and stage presence — I would start with a listen to “Better Off Alone", “ICONIC!” and “Dancin’ Til We Die”.

Updates

I recently collaborated on a recipe/Reel with BuzzFeed Tasty and it just went live on their IG! The recipe for the no-bake lime raspberry tart was sent to you all last week here, but it’s now up on easygayoven.com as well.

Tasty

Tasty on Instagram: “Don’t turn your oven on if you don’t have to! This creamy no-bake lime raspberry tart from @easygayoven is secretly set with gelatin, layered with store-bought raspberry jam, and encased in a buttery gingersnap crust. Recipe is on easygayoven.com.”

June 26, 2023

This Week’s Recipe

So this is the part where I tell you I think “fudge-y” is one of the most misused descriptors in the food world. I do think fudge brownies exist, but I always see bloggers or food publications call brownies fudge-y and I can fully see that, well, they don’t look like fudge! If you think about actual chocolate fudge, it’s like biting into refrigerated buttercream. It’s creamy, melts in your mouth (literally!) and has no other discernible texture. I can see how some kinds of old-fashioned recipes for brownies with no leavening and a very small amount of flour might achieve a fudge-like texture. But no one wants those!

The problem is, when someone types into Google “fudge-y brownies” what they actually want is gooey brownies that are slightly underbaked in the middle, super moist and fall-apart, or loaded with melty chocolate — or they want a recipe that tastes like a box-mix. They don’t want brownies that actually taste like fudge! And box mixes are almost never fudge-like. If anything they lean more cake-y.

All of this to say, I try to avoid “fudge-y” as a adjective because everyone has a different definition. So let me try to be more clear about what these, my best-ever brownies, are like. They are thick, chewy, leavened with 1/2 teaspoon of baking powder for some lift, but they don’t veer into cake-y territory. They are rich, but not cloying — moist, but won’t glue your mouth shut. A hefty amount of salt balances out all the sweetness and works with the espresso powder to boost chocolate flavor.

And the very elusive hallmark of a great brownie recipe: these have a shiny top blanket of paper-thin crust that wrinkles and flakes. There are different schools of thought about what the key factor is in achieving this top, and from my research and several tests I can confirm it isn’t actually one factor — it’s a few. Here are the things I have found make a difference:

1. The most obvious and the one that everyone agrees on is sugar being dissolved in the moisture of the batter. That’s why many recipes call for cooking sugar in butter or whipping sugar with eggs. In my experience, whipping sugar in eggs does a much better job at fully dissolving the granules. The heat from melting butter helps dissolve some of the sugar, but butter doesn’t have that much water content to start with so it’s not a great vehicle for dissolving sugar. A half-cup of powdered sugar dissolves perfectly in the butter in this recipe, because the sugar is already so fine.

   

2. Chocolate chips. This excellent article from PJ Hamel at King Arthur Baking has helped me a lot in my shiny-top quest. For some recipes, like the one she uses, the difference really boils down to whether or not chocolate chips were included. I am not a scientist so I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here, but the batches I made with chocolate chips have a shinier, papery top than the ones that didn’t. But the plot thickens still! I also made batches with chocolate chips that didn’t produce a shiny crust. We’ll cover that in the next point.

   For my most recent test, I also used a technique I learned from the blog Philosophy of Yum to really make that top crust shiny (although, it was already pretty flaky and shatter-y by simply mixing the chips in at the end.) For this final batch, I melted about 1/4 cup of the chocolate chips into the hot butter, added about 3/4 cup to the finished batter, then sprinkled a few over top, popped the tin in the oven for just a minute, then smeared the melted chips into the top. I know it seems like a lot, but having the chocolate incorporated in three different ways seemed to really help produce a shiny, wrinkly crust.

   

   The difference between 3/4 cup cocoa powder and 1 tablespoon water (left) 2/3 cup cocoa and no water (middle) and 2/3 cup cocoa, no water, and milk chocolate melted into the batter and smeared on top (right))

3. Water content. This one threw me for a loop because from test 2 to 3, we went from 2/3 cup Dutch process cocoa powder to 3/4 cup. This would be the only difference that mattered for a the next tests as my shiny top (which was there on test 2!) vanished.

   OR SO I THOUGHT. My brownies went from glossy and chewy to dull and cake-y (still good though) — but it wasn’t due to the cocoa powder, at least not completely. I was trying to add in the amount of water that we lost from browning the butter, but in the batches with shiny tops, that water actually cooked off when added to the browned butter. But in one batch I added the water to slightly cooled browned butter, so it never evaporated in the pan.

   So my theory is that 1 tablespoon of water was enough to make the batter too watery and thus prevent a crust from forming. So in my most recent test, I removed the additional water from the equation and we were back in business baby! Again, I am not totally sure about the science behind why this happens, but it goes to show that even slight differences in ratios and amounts can wreak havoc on delicate baking techniques like this.

   

My Best-Ever Brownies

This recipe has been updated.

Makes one 9-inch square pan, about 16 brownies