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Knize Original Desert Dot Com One Hundred Times Chocholate Sugar Time Incorporated

Brownie Recipe

Prep

  • Oven at 325
  • Pam in 9x13 pan, no parchment

Mix Ingredients

  • 1 cup flour
  • 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
  • 2/3 cups confectioner’s sugar
  • 4 eggs (room temp, or close to it)
  • 1 cup neutral vegetable oil (canola, probably)
  • 1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 tsp salt
  • 2/3 cup cocoa powder
  • 2 to4 tsp vanilla based on how much chocolate you dump in there
  • 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 3/4 cup to 1 1/2 cup of roughly chopped baking chocolate bar. Aim for at least 60% dark. Powder and tiny slivers from the chop are encouraged.

Frosting Ingredients

  • 1 stock non-salted butter
  • At least 3 cups of confectioner’s sugar
  • At least 4 Tbsp heavy cream
  • 2 tsp vanilla, this can go higher but never lower
  • Tiny little pinch of salt
  • Optional food coloring. Gel requires no adjustment to the recipe, but add any liquid-based coloring early to account for thinning.

Brownie Batter Instructions

  • Combine every ingredient that isn’t literally wet. I know sugar is often considered a wet ingredient but put it in with the dry here. Both sugars, flour, cocoa, salt, baking powder and both chocolates. Reminder that combine means to mix until homogenous, it’s easier to do this before adding the chocolate but not required. Optionally, if you’re skipping the frosting, reserve a portion of the chocolate for sprinkling on top later.
  • Add the eggs, oil, and vanilla to the mix. Mix as little as possible to avoid tough brownies. A good strategy is taking big folds from the bottom center and moving them out to the sides. Once it seems you’ve gotten most of the big pockets, stir much harder than you think you need to while looking for remaining dry ingredients. Once you stop seeing powders, stop mixing. Tiny bits of unmixed dry ingredients will be unnoticeable after baking.
  • Spread the batter into the pan. Start from the center and push out towards the corners before trying to level it off. There’s no need to tap the pan like with cakes but doing so could help level off the batter.
  • Put in the 325 oven. Check after 30 minutes, the original was done at 350 for nearly 40 minutes. The goal is to open the oven door as few times as you can. In our house we prefer slightly overdone to slightly underdone, so what you’re looking for is a toothpick in the center to come out clean.
  • Remove from the oven and let rest at room temperature for at least an hour.

Frosting Instructions

  • Cream the stick of butter with a stand mixer. Doing this with one stick of butter is surprisingly tedious but scrape the sides often and it’ll be done in no time.
  • Slowly incorporate the first 1 ½ cup of confectioner’s sugar, still scraping the sides when you can. From here, use your scraping spatula to smooth out the frosting and taste it a little. If it matches your preferred consistency and taste, stop. If it doesn’t keep going. Adding sugar will make the frosting thicker and sweeter, so worry about taste before consistency here.
  • If your frosting is as sweet as you would like but too thick to spread easily, add heavy cream a tablespoon or so at a time until it is as thin as you would like. This will slightly dilute the sweetness, but you can always add a little more sugar in. Add less sugar than you would think in this step, or you’re going to end up with a sweet milky mess.
  • Add the vanilla and the pinch of salt. Seriously salt helps but you can overdo it easily with such a small batch of frosting. Add salt at your own risk and use it sparingly.

For reference, I used about 2 ¼ cups of confectioner’s sugar and 2 tbs of cream to make the test batch of frosting. It was very good. I also used gel coloring which adds basically no flavor and causes functionally no change in consistency. This batch of frosting can be doubled if you want a huge layer of frosting, but that’s stupid so I don’t recommend it.

Notes

This is what Joel named it, letter for letter.
— Ben