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Icebreaker Brownies

These brownies are rich and heavy. For all those calories and fat they really should be cut into small squares for serving. Better anyway because then you can have seconds and thirds. By my approximation, the recipe below makes about a quarter million of those. The good news is that the recipe halves well and would probably even quarter in case you didn’t have any friends with whom to share.¹

Another great thing about these brownies is that they love to sit lightly covered for a day or two and just get better.

Ingredients

Quantity	1/2 Recipe	1/3 Recipe	Dry Ingredients
120 g.	60 g.	40 g.	flour
260 g.	130 g.	85 g.	cocoa
650 g.	325 g.	215 g.	sugar
4 g.	2 g.	2 g.	salt
2 g.	omit	omit	baking soda

Quantity	1/2 Recipe	1/3 Recipe	Wet Ingredients
370 g.	185 g.	125 g.	butter
90 g.	45 g.	30 g.	olive oil2
6	3	2.	eggs
140 ml	70 ml	50 ml	water

Instructions

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Start by preheating your oven to 325° F (160° C).

Butter your baking pan³ well and sprinkle with some flour tapping it around to cover the butter.

Collect your ingredients plus a knife, a scraper, a whisk, your scale and your kitchen machine together.

Weigh the flour, cocoa, sugar, salt and baking soda directly into the bowl of your mixer and give it a good swish-about with the whisk.

Next measure the remaining ingredients into the bowl and mix until a mostly moist dough is formed.

Spread the dough in the baking pan and bake for about 45 minutes. Your brownies are done when you insert a knife-blade or toothpick into the center of the pan and it comes out clean.

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Footnotes

1. In that case, go ahead and make the half recipe. Remember, brownies are are like money, always appreciated by strangers and if you share enough and you’ll find that you always have friends. ↩

2. Olive oil here is part of the secret of these brownies. I once exchanged it for a neutral tasting vegetable oil and was surprised to say the result was nowhere near as good. The richness of olive oil is a fine compliment to all that cocoa where the vegetable oil, just tasted oily. ↩

3. I really should measure my baking pan one of these days. It’s a big one though, bigger than a 9x11. My mom had one this size for making lasagne. From an eyeball-it perspective, I’d say a normal 9x11” sheet pan is to the size of my baking pan as a letter-sized piece of paper is to legal size. Feel free to do the math on that one if you are so inclined… ↩