The Ultimate Brownie Book: Thousands Of Ways To Make Americas Favorite Treat, Including Blondies, Frostings, And Doctored Brownie Mixes

The Ultimate Brownie Book Bruce Weinstein & Mark Scarbrough Thousands of Ways 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 fudge and cake, they’re part confection, part pastry. In other words, they’re the stuff of dreams. To warp William Blake’s riff on the Tyger: “What immortal hand or eye dare concoct such awesome richness?” For us as for him, answers are few; so stories abound. Here’s one: A Bangor, Maine, housewife was so excited by her latest creation that she forgot to put on her mitts, reached into the oven, and promptly dropped an extra-rich chocolate sheet cake right on the floor. Naturally, the cake collapsed. (She, too?) Undeterred, and with Yankee frugality, she served it anyway—and so began dropping all her cakes, although she never again forgot her oven mitts. Or how about this one? Nineteenth-century midwestern farmwomen considered it a sin to waste food, although better farming methods were making for greater and greater production. Unfortunately, home refrigeration hadn’t caught up with other technologies, so all that extra butter and eggs spoiled far too quickly. To solve the problem, these economical housewives began putting extra in their cookie batters, although they had to balance that richness with addi- buttery and fudgy. Or did you hear the one about the New York chef who accidentally dropped chocolate into a brown sugar cake? Or the French chef who had to make a dessert he thought would satisfy American fat-cat tycoons visiting Paris to promote President McKinley’s trade policies? Such are the myths. Here’s what we know: Blondies actually came first, followed by brownies as a variation. Today we might think of blondies as brownies without a chocolate batter, as if blondies were just an afterthought, a simplification of the original. But Fannie Farmer, that American culinary pioneer, wrote the first known recipe in the 1896 Boston CookingSchool Cook Book. And what she proposed had no chocolate in it at all. Instead, molasses-rich cakes were browned in small individual tins. Thus the name: “brownies.” In 1897 the Sears, Roebuck catalog featured “brownies” by mail order only, but these cookies were nothing like what we call brownies, or even blondies for that matter. They weren’t made from chocolate at all, but were instead named after J. Palmer Cox’s cartoon characters, so popular in the Gilded Age. The cookies were probably variants of “melt-aways,” an American classic that disappears in your mouth like those little elves in the forest. Why no chocolate brownies? Believe it or not, chocolate was considered unhealthy, even sinful, in many nineteenth-century circles. It was associated with the French. (Horrors!) And it was railed against as a mind-altering drug. (We couldn’t agree more.) Fortunately the turn of the last century brought new ideas. F