The Great Brownie Search recipe #1

I love brownies, and I'm on a mission to find the best recipes out there. I must clarify that I'm actually looking for the best recipes using cocoa powder. I don't have the patience at this point to be melting chocolate when you can use cocoa powder and get great results. Some would even argue that cocoa powder makes a better brownie because using butter to replace the lack of cocoa butter from the chocolate mixed with the granulated sugar creates a soft center and a crusty top.



There are a lot of recipes boasting 'best' or even 'best ever'. Today I am trying King Arther's The Best Fudge Brownies Ever recipe that is featured on the back of their unbleached flour bag. I looked on the recipe page and they have quite a few listing for brownies, but this one is not in their data base. So you must go out and purchase a bag of flour to get the recipe.



On with the review. I have the pan in the oven as I'm writting, at 350 for 28-30 minutes. As far as time and temp go, the temp is standard, but I'm a little skeptical that these will actually be done in 28-30 minutes. In my experience, brownies have usually taken more time than called for and this time frame is on the short side at that.


not everybody likes nuts


This recipe calls for a 9"x13" pan, where most brownies recipes call for a 8"x8". Bigger yeild, that's good. When comparing the ingredients, the amounts of butter, eggs and cocoa powder all seemed to be comparable to other recipes, if not a little more. But the amount of flour called for was a little higher than what I'm familiar with. So the question will be if the ratio of butter, sugar, egg, cocoa to flour makes for a delicious fudgy texture, or as the recipe boasts, the best fudge brownies ever. Or if they will end up being too cakey.

After all was said and done, the brownies ended up taking about 37 minutes, not too bad. Brownies are best if you let them cool a bit, this is always hard for me because I'm usually ready to eat them right out of the oven. I'm taking these to share with friends though, so they will have ample time to cool and set which will make for easy cutting.

These brownies had a thin crust on the top, but nothing very crunchy. I'm assuming this has to do with the step in the recipe where it has you cook the melted butter and sugar a touch more after stirring them together which says will yeild a shiny top crust. The texture was chewy, not cakey, but not fudgy. It was moist, not too sweet, but also not rich enough for my taste. All in all, a good brownie, but I'd say not the best fudge brownie ever. I really like a rich fudgy brownie, one that packs a large punch where you can't eat more than one or two or else it's an overload of chocolatey richness. This brownie was a little too easy to eat, I found that I wasn't satisfied eating just one or two and had to stop myself at three and four! So, it was tasty, but my search is still on.