People who adore chocolate have reservations about cocoa. Even if you buy the most beautiful cocoa in the world, baking things with it that taste as rich as 70% cocoa bars is rare. So, if you’d told me about a killer recipe for cocoa brownies a few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have believed you, but two things have happened since then.
The first is that I already had one. It was a tiny square at 10 Downing last week, scattered among little tears of homemade marshmallows, near a puddle of homemade hot fudge sauce, and carousel-ed around a cocoa nib buckwheat panna cotta that blew my mind because did you know that the opposite of sweet in the world of chocolate doesn’t always have to be bitter? It’s not always very sweet, so you can really taste the chocolate.
The second reason is that I looked up a well-known cocoa brownie recipe and the description ruined it for me. Cocoa is not listed as a compromise — something to use just because you have it in your pantry, something shelf-stable for the longevity of a brownie mix, etc. — but as an intention. The only fat in Medrich’s brownie comes from butter, not a combination of butter and the cocoa butter found in bar chocolate, and all of the sugar is pure granulated sugar, not a combination of it and the milled sugar used in commercial chocolate production. I’d never thought about either before, but there I was, nodding and eagerly agreeing.
The end result may persuade those who believe that all roads to fudgy, dark, and rich brownies must be paved with bricks of tempered chocolate to reconsider. And now I’m going to say something that will undoubtedly cause many of you to abandon this recipe and never return, even though you shouldn’t: I believe people who enjoy box mix brownies will especially enjoy these. They both have a moist, dense crumb, but fortunately —For me, who finds the taste of boxed brownies to be shockingly lacking — not a flavor. Because the only wet ingredients are eggs, butter, and vanilla (which could be replaced with a scrape of a fresh bean segment rubbed into sugar), they’d be perfect for a Homemade Brownie Mix Gift Kit. If you were feeling generous enough to share, this might not be your first reaction.
