Confectious: A tale of two brownies

I was going to start this post with "It was the best of brownies, it was the worst of brownies," but then it would have sounded like the post was about a really bad brownie, which I promise you it isn't. Instead, it's about putting my post on how to develop a brownie recipe into practice. I thought it would be helpful to put up two recipes I wrote using the tips and talk about them a bit. Let's start with the cakey.

Cakey:

6 oz softened butter
1 cup white sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
2 oz chocolate - melted
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 1/2 cups AP flour
1/2 cup cocoa powder
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

Method: Creaming

I started developing this recipe by looking at the fat. This was meant to be the extreme cakey/soft side of the brownie universe. I chose to use mostly butter because I knew that it would lead to soft brownies. Because I wouldn't have much chocolate in the recipe if I went this way, I added cocoa powder. I knew, also, that eggs contribute to a fluffy, cakey brownie, so I used a relatively high proportion of them. The baking powder also helps the brownies to have that nice airy crumb that just screams "cake." And lastly I knew I needed a lot of flour to give them structure. Once I had decided on how much flour (and normally you'd adjust this during the baking process, but I had guessed right), I went back and adjusted my baking powder. Since there are effectively 2 cups of flour (lump in the cocoa powder), I needed 2 tsp of baking powder to get them the perfect amount of rise. And the amount of sugar? That was simply an educated guess. I usually figure about twice as much sugar (by volume) as butter is a good place to start. As far as the amount that a recipe will make, that's something you really only learn once you've made the batter. Then you look through your pans and figure out how many what you just wrote down makes.

It was probably two weeks after I developed this recipe that I put it to the test. To my delight, it worked just like I'd created it to. These brownies are on the verge of a chocolate cake.

Fudgy:

8 oz dark chocolate
2 tbsp butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 egg
1 tsp vanilla
1/4 tsp espresso powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 cup flour

Method: Melting

I started these fudgy brownies with a lot of fat in the form of chocolate. Because chocolate is harder than butter at room temperature, brownies made with it will be chewier than those made with butter. I also kept the eggs down in order to not get too much of a cakey structure. I also kept the flour to a small amount for this reason. These were a super simple recipe, and they turned out just like I hoped. The batter was so thick going in that I had to use a spatula to spread it out in the pan! I think next time I might try even less flour, but these still turned out really fudgy and delicious.

So I hope that gave everyone a good example of a couple of recipes for radically different brownies. You too can put my brownie tips to use and write your own recipe for any type of brownies you want.