In past cafeteria life --high school, college, job at college, job at high school-- I ate lots of brownies at "celebratory" cookouts. There were the cakey brownies, puffy and bordering on tan in color, and the dense brownies, a bit chewier but still lacking in any substantial chocolate flavor. As with most mass produced food, neither type of brownie was satistfying. I can still picture the dense one, dark, gooey, and sprinkled with powdered sugar and sitting on a white cocktail napkin, leaving a square of grease behind when I start to take a bite. After the first disappoiting bite, I'd follow it up with a slice of slightly underripe watermelon, and maybe a White Rock soda.
During those college years, my brownie needs were met by a family friend. She made truly excellent brownies, thick, chewy, moist, studded with chocolate chunks, and frosted with chocolate buttercream. They'd arrive in the mail -- still in the aluminum pan, carefully concealed underneath layers of foil and plastic wrap, no worse for 800 mile trip they'd made from South Carolina to Maryland. After the first one, I'd leave the knife, sticky with crumbs and frosting, in the pan, making it so easy to carve off yet another little square. Years later, I managed to acquire a copy of the recipe, and I made it once, remembering the huge pan we consumed at my parents' house in the days leading up to my wedding. In my own kitchen, the brownies were good, but not the same. I still treasure the recipe, but rarely find myself with the time and ingredient combination to whip them up.
I always have the ingredients for the Katherine Hepburn brownies sitting in my pantry. They combine the chewy, gooey texture I love with cinnamon (which I doubled for this recipe) and coffee. For things like this recipe, I cherish the extra large jar of instant coffee that I keep on hand only for my mother in law. I loved these brownies, and immediately took them to Allen's lab so that I didn't eat the whole pan. Only now, I'm searching for the memories to go with them.
*While these looked and tasted great, they looked rather blah in photos. Haven't mastered brownie photography yet.
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4 comments:
YUM. I loved these brownies.
I'm always up for trying a brownie, and you're right, there are so many different variations and most just don't make the grade. This one was really chocolaty and tasty, though!
These were almost tooo easy to be soooo good.
I'm lousy at food photography. Luckily, I'm a good baker, and these brownies were really good. Just like yours.
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