'Just had to' brownies

I'm sure that I'm not alone in bookmarking copious numbers of recipes from other food blogs. Occasionally I even get round to making some of them :) But sometimes a recipe pops up in your reader and you just have to make it right there and then. This happened to me twice in one day last week - once with Wendy's Baked Honey and Mustard Butterbeans which I only didn't make that night because I already had dinner planned (but looking at the picture again just now I still really really want to eat that dish right now!). The other was Alice Medrich's cocoa brownies which popped up on The Wednesday Chef. I don't know quite what lured me in about these brownies quite so irrevocably. It's an interesting recipe, using cocoa powder and no chocolate, and very little flour, but I suspect that it was the chocolatey photos that seduced me. I did go and make a half batch that very evening, and took most of them to my sewing group the next night.


I've made a lot of brownie recipes in the past, and what generally wins me over or puts me off is whether the darn things cook through properly. I like some barely cooked fudginess as much as the next person (who likes barely cooked fudginess - it must be said that this seems to really divide people, as evidenced by the two brownie-eaters in this house). But completely uncooked goop: not so much. These brownies did cook all the way through and firmed up nicely to cut into little pieces. Taste-wise they were very cocoa-ey - actually a bit more than I like, but The Scientist and my sewing buddies liked them. I'm just not too cocoa-y a sort of girl. So while I may not eat them myself again, I will happily make them for other people :)


Now, butterbeans, you say....?

Alice Medrich's cocoa brownie recipe at The Wednesday Chef