The Ultimate Brownie Book: Thousands of Ways to Make America's Favorite Treat, including Blondies, Frostings, and Doctored Brownie Mixes

438 Pages·2002·6.31 MB·English

by  Bruce Weinstein

The
Ultimate Brownie
Book
Bruce Weinstein &
Thousands of Ways
Mark Scarbrough
to Make America’s
Favorite Treat, including Blondies,
Frostings, and Doctored Brownie Mixes
To Harriet Bell, for believing us and in us
Contents
1 Introduction
4 Special Equipment, Ingredients, and Tips for Success
12 Brownies
109 Blondies
148 Easy Icings, Frostings, and Drizzles
167 Fun with Brownie Mixes
199 Source Guide
201 Index
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Other Books by
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Introduction
If brownies weren’t real, tional chocolate. The result? Dense little cakes,
we’d have to make them up. Both buttery and fudgy.
fudge and cake, they’re part confec- Or did you hear the one about the New York
tion, part pastry. In other words, they’re the chef who accidentally dropped chocolate into a
stuff of dreams. brown sugar cake? Or the French chef who had
To warp William Blake’s riff on the Tyger: to make a dessert he thought would satisfy
“What immortal hand or eye dare concoct such American fat-cat tycoons visiting Paris to pro-
awesome richness?” For us as for him, answers mote President McKinley’s trade policies?
are few; so stories abound. Here’s one: A Ban- Such are the myths. Here’s what we know:
gor, Maine, housewife was so excited by her lat- Blondies actually came first, followed by brown-
est creation that she forgot to put on her mitts, ies as a variation. Today we might think of
reached into the oven, and promptly dropped an blondies as brownies without a chocolate batter,
extra-rich chocolate sheet cake right on the floor. as if blondies were just an afterthought, a simpli-
Naturally, the cake collapsed. (She, too?) Unde- fication of the original. But Fannie Farmer, that
terred, and with Yankee frugality, she served it American culinary pioneer, wrote the first
anyway—and so began dropping all her cakes, known recipe in the 1896 Boston Cooking-
although she never again forgot her oven mitts. School Cook Book. And what she proposed had
Or how about this one? Nineteenth-century no chocolate in it at all. Instead, molasses-rich
midwestern farmwomen considered it a sin to cakes were browned in small individual tins.
waste food, although better farming methods Thus the name: “brownies.”
were making for greater and greater production. In 1897 the Sears, Roebuck catalog featured
Unfortunately, home refrigeration hadn’t caught “brownies” by mail order only, but these cook-
up with other technologies, so all that extra but- ies were nothing like what we call brownies, or
ter and eggs spoiled far too quickly. To solve the even blondies for that matter. They weren’t
problem, these economical housewives began made from chocolate at all, but were instead
putting extra in their cookie batters, although named after J. Palmer Cox’s cartoon characters,
they had to balance that richness with addi- so popular in the Gilded Age. The cookies were
probably variants of “melt-aways,” an American phlets, and elevated to culinary status at restau-
classic that disappears in your mouth like those rants like “21” and Delmonico’s in New York
little elves in the forest. City. Since those days, the brownie’s popularity
Why no chocolate brownies? Believe it or not, has never lulled. It’s been sparked by state fair
chocolate was considered unhealthy, even sin- bake-offs and celebrity endorsements. Liz
ful, in many nineteenth-century circles. It was Smith once ran Katherine Hepburn’s brownie
associated with the French. (Horrors!) And it recipe in the New York Post, instigating a
was railed against as a mind-altering drug. (We national craze long before the Internet made
couldn’t agree more.) such things everyday.
Fortunately the turn of the last century Brownies and blondies may well be the quin-
brought new ideas. Frankly, Americans were tessential American treats: perfect for family
becoming more cosmopolitan. So by the 1906 gatherings, parties, and picnics. These dense
edition of the Fanny Farmer cookbook, choco- cakes freeze well, travel easily in a get-up-and-go
late had been added to that original brownie society, and taste like heaven, despite being
recipe—but the name remained the same. And quick and easy every time.
by 1916, Maria Parloa, one of the founders of
the Boston Cooking School, had adapted some
of Fannie Farmer’s unpublished notes to write a HOW TO USE THIS BOOK
chocolaty brownie recipe for a pamphlet to be
distributed by Walter Baker & Company, the As in the other Ultimate books in this series, the
progenitor of Baker’s Chocolate, then of Dor- recipes here are alphabetical—but with a slight
cester, Massachusetts. difference. Rather than one booklong list, there
There were yet more changes on the culinary are four chapters of recipes: brownies, blondies,
horizon. As technology advanced and home easy icings, and fun with brownie mixes.
ovens got larger, baking pans did too. So the Within each chapter the recipes are still
brownie changed—no longer in little individual alphabetical. And they are all basics—nothing
tins, but now a sheet cake. And as American frou-frou or esoteric. The point is to make old-
affluence rose in this F. Scott Fitzgerald world, fashioned, straightforward treats: chocolate
so did our taste for rich meals, rich desserts. syrup brownies, cream cheese blondies, seven
Recipes for brownies indicate that the cakes minute frosting. (Of course, we hope some of
were becoming so heavy with butter, they the basics surprise you: chile brownies, fruit-
would collapse in on themselves. And so the cake blondies, cola icing.)
fudgy brownie was born. Each of these basics then becomes the platform
By the roaring 1920s, the brownie craze was for variations. Here’s where the real fun begins.
full-blown. Recipes were splashed in newspa- So many things that can be added to a brownie
per columns, peppered in food-industry pam- batter! As we worked on the book, we ended up
2 THE ULT IMAT E BROW NIE BOOK
with long lists of variations: Walnut Applesauce We hope you have as much fun baking these
Brownies, Cranberry Applesauce Brownies, treats as we did testing the recipes. You cannot
Cranberry Walnut Applesauce Brownies, Gin- imagine the hundreds of trays that came out of a
ger Cranberry Walnut Applesauce Brownies, small Manhattan kitchen for months on end! No
and on and on and on. So we’ve shifted the for- matter how many we brought to friends’ homes
mat a bit. After each recipe, there’s a list of pos- and offices, people never seemed to tire of
sible additions (spices, flavorings, and mix-ins) brownies. They even seemed miffed if we
in the amount appropriate for the given pan size thought we shouldn’t impose with one more
and batter volume. You can choose among them tray. Hundreds of pounds of butter and choco-
at will. With so many possibilities, there’s surely late later, we know from personal experience the
a lifetime of brownie recipes here. lasting appeal of these American favorites.
INTRODUCT ION 3
Special Equipment,
Ingredients, and
Tips for Success
SPECIAL EQUIPMENT chocolate chopper. This handy metal
tool looks like a mini pitchfork, with three to five
baking pans. Almost every recipe in this prongs that are not sharp but are heavy enough
book calls for one of three pan sizes: an 8-inch to break up a five-pound bar of chocolate. For
square, a 9-inch square, and a 9 × 13-inch rec- this task, a chocolate chopper is far superior to a
tangle. Always use the pan size called for— knife: (1) It conserves chocolate, making less
make no substitutions here. The recipes, of dust; and (2) it doesn’t bend or dull, as a knife
course, have been developed with a specific pan might.
size in mind: smaller ones for more esoteric
brownies, larger ones for crowd-pleasers. We kitchen scale. This invaluable tool will
prefer standard commercial-grade aluminum allow you to have the exact amount of chocolate
baking pans—even over nonstick pans, which needed for a recipe, whether you’re using
can scratch easily (once that happens, they con- blocks, morsels, or chips. Make sure it’s set to
duct heat unevenly and, worse yet, may pose ounces, not grams.
health problems). As for glass pans, they tend to
overbake the edges of brownies, superheating mixers. Many of the recipes in this book
the chocolate there in suspension, causing it to offer you a choice for mixing batters: either by
burn and turn bitter. If you do use glass, reduce hand with a wooden spoon, or with an electric
the oven temperature by 25 degrees to avoid mixer. Particularly if you have arthritis or a con-
this problem. The baking time, however, will nective tissue disorder, a mixer is invaluable for
most likely not change, since glass heats so effi- creating a smooth batter. If you have no such
ciently. problems, here’s a rule of thumb: Hand-mixing