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Hello again. Today we are going to make brownies. What can you say about brownies? Everybody
loves them, and everybody thinks, "Oh, brownies are so hard to make." Well, I'll let you
in on a little secret—they're not very hard. There's just two ways to do it. Either
you go buy a box, which calls for you to dump the contents of the box into the bowl, add
a little bit of oil, add a couple of eggs, stir it a little bit, pop it in the oven,
and you're done. That's the easiest way. That's not the way we're going to do it
today. The slightly more difficult, yet oh-so-satisfying way to make a brownie is to start from scratch,
and so today, I'm going to teach you how to make brownies, chocolate brownies from
scratch. Brownies are a staple on the American table.
They are great to take to potlucks, they are customizable, I'm going to tell you a little bit today
how to take this basic chocolate brownie recipe and make it in a way that anybody you know
will like it...unless if that person doesn't like chocolate, but there's even a brownie
for them, they're called Blondie's. Look them up; they're pretty good, too.
Today, though, it's the chocolate brownie that we are focusing on. And you don't need
a whole lot to make it, in fact you probably have most of these ingredients already at
home. Of course, with a chocolate brownie, one of the things you're really going to
need to have is chocolate. And there are a couple ways you can do it—we're going
to actually today make our brownies with the chocolate powder. Now this is, make sure,
this is very important, this is without sugar chocolate. If you buy the kind that's like
the stir it up with a little bit of milk and you drink it as hot cocoa, it's going to
make a really, really bad brownie, so when you go to get this, make sure it's unsweetened
chocolate. Now, you can start with either this powder,
or the other way that some people in the States will use is with Baker's squares. And this
is actually preformed chocolate, sort of similar to if you would go out and buy a chocolate
bar, but without the sugar. The difference here, is fat. There is already fat in this,
there is no fat in this. So, these make a pretty creamy brownie, but we don't need
them. If you just have this powder, it makes the exact same thing, without the fat, so
we're going to start with this today, and just make our brownies just a little bit more
healthy. And chocolate's a healthy thing, right?
You are also going to need flour, and granulated white sugar. You can use the heavily granulated,
or this is sort of the more fine version, it's up to you. The consistency of the brownies
will change just a little bit. I prefer to have the more finely granulated, but if all
you have on hand or all you can find is the more coarsely granulated sugar, that's fine,
it's not going to hurt anything. You are also going to need a little bit of
baking soda and salt. These are going to be our dry ingredients.
For our wet ingredients, two eggs, some vanilla, and some melted butter. And, just a note on
the vanilla, sometimes vanilla is pretty hard to find, and I looked it up last night, and
did you know that maple syrup is actually a really good switch for vanilla. So if you
can't find vanilla, find some maple syrup, switch them in, teaspoon for teaspoon, and
it's probably not going to make a big difference in the flavor of your recipe. The final thing
you're going to need is your customizable add-ins, and we'll talk about that in just a little bit.
The nice thing about a basic brownie recipe is that it should be a one-bowl recipe, meaning that you can just put everything into this
one bowl, stir it all up, and then just put it into your one pan. That also minimizes
your total clean up that you have to do. So, what are you going to do first? Well first
of all you are going to put your cocoa—and this is going to be about ¾ of a cup of cocoa.
And then you are going to put in a little bit of your baking soda. Now, you might be
asking, "I've heard about baking soda, I've heard about baking powder. What's
the difference?" The answer to that is, "Good question." People argue this all
the time. They are both used in helping things to rise, so if you don't want flat brownies
or flat cookies you want to put these things in there. What's the difference between
when do you use one and when do you use the other? I don't know. That is the answer
to that question, so sorry if that was a burning question that you had.
You're going to put your cocoa and your baking soda in here, stir them up a little
bit, and then after that you are going to add something that I forgot to tell you that
you are going to need, which is going to be some boiling water. I happen to have my handy
dandy little water boiler back here, but if you don't have that just stick a pot on
the oven or on the stove and let it set for a little bit. Don't burn your hands, which
I just did, and put your water in with this, and you're going to stir it up.
You're also at this time going to add in another of your wet ingredients, you're
going to add about half of your butter. And again, remember when I told you about the
way that we do it in the States, where we have those bricks of the chocolate that you
melt? Right here, this is sort of, you're simulating those bricks. You're adding in
the fat to the chocolate and that's going to help make these brownies really creamy
and fudgy and amazingly delicious. So you're just going to mix this in. The
reason you only add a little of your butter at this time is that you want to make sure
you're not getting your brownie too wet or too dry all at the same time. It makes
it easier to incorporate things if you don't have just tons of water sludging around, but
also if you don't make it too dry. In other baking, a lot of times you'll add
in all the dry ingredients and then later add in all the wet ingredients, but with brownies,
and especially when you are working with the cocoa powder, it's easier if you just kind
of mix things up in stages. So you're just going to mix it up, and you can already smell
it, this smells amazingly chocolaty. So, once this is smooth, then you're going
to add your eggs. There's lots of thought out there about whether you should crack the
egg directly into the bowl or crack it into another one. If you're good at cracking
eggs you can crack it directly into the bowl. If you're not so good at cracking eggs,
or if you ALWAYS end up with that one little piece of the shell that you're digging around
in there...you might as well just crack it into another bowl.
A trick to cracking eggs, some people can do it one handed, I can't, I haven't practiced
it enough, but just, a light tap on the surface should do it, and then use your thumbs to
pry the egg apart and do it that way. Now, if your recipe calls for just the egg
white or the egg yolk, at this point, instead of opening it up and letting it fall out,
that's when you start going from side to side, keep that yolk in the eggshell, and
the white will fall out. Maybe sometime we'll use a recipe that will show that.
So, two eggs, shell-free, hopefully, and we're just going to put them in there, and then
you're going to continue to stir. And again, we're not adding too much liquid, but we
are going to get pretty liquidy here, so in just a minute we're going to add in our
flour. Different brownie recipes are going to call
for really similar amounts of the chocolate, the eggs are going to differ between two to
four, the soda, that's going to stay the same, but what's really going to change
in the different recipes is going to be the sugar and the flour. Brownies—there are
two schools of thought on brownies. You can either make fudgy brownies or cakey brownies.
Fudgy brownies are sort of going to be the more dense, moist brownies, and cakey brownies
are going to be slightly dryer and more like the cake that you might like making and eating.
I personally prefer a fudgy brownie, and that's what we're making today.
If you prefer a cakey brownie, it's really simple: add more flour. That's it. So, we're
going to put in the flour right now, and all we need for flour in this recipe is going
to be 1 and ¼ cup. And so you can measure this with any measuring cup, it does not make
any difference. I prefer this one because I can see through it, and be able to tell
that I got just a little too much, so just dump that out and pour it in. And, the secret
here? Don't add it all at the same time, because it makes it really hard to put it
together, and if you add it all at the same time you're going to end up stirring and
getting flour in your face and then you'll sneeze, and then, it's just not as fun,
so go ahead and just add in half of your flour and stir it until it's pretty incorporated.
Make sure that if you're using a square bowl like I am that you are getting it all
out of the corners. The worst thing is when you're pouring this out and you end up having
flour still unincorporated into your batter. Not fun at all.
So, add that in, add in the second half of your flour, and you're going to keep working.
Now, you're going to notice that this is getting pretty dry, and so at this point,
if it's a little bit too hard to stir in, remember all that leftover butter that we
had? This is a good time to add your butter. So again, usually, with recipes for things
like cookies and cakes, you're going to do all the dry ingredients, and then all the
wet ingredients. Not for brownies, it's better to alternate like this.
So, here we go, keep mixing it in, that butter will—and make sure your butter is melted
when you start out, that will make your life a lot easier, if you don't have melted butter
then you're going to be dealing with clumps of butter, and especially butter straight
out of the fridge is really, really tough. So, now, clearly this is not going to be a
very good brownie, so we're going to have to add a little bit more liquid here with
our vanilla, or remember, it could be maple syrup if you have that instead. But also,
right now, if we were to eat this, it would taste terrible. Why? Because we haven't
added the sugar. Now, I mentioned before that this is granulated
sugar. There is a difference between granulated sugar and powdered sugar. They are both white,
but if you were able to zoom in on this, you would actually be able to see the individual
crystals. If you can see the individual crystals, it's granulated. If it looks more like the
consistency of flour, that's powdered sugar. You don't want that for this part of the
brownies, but you will want it a little bit later when you're going to make the frosting
for these brownies. But we'll get to that eventually.
Again, just as people differ with the amount of flour that they want, they're also going
to differ with the amount of sugar. You can add anywhere between, oh, a cup, a cup and
a half, to even two cups of sugar, it completely depends on how sweet you want your brownies
to be. If you like a really really sweet brownie, add two cups, if you want a slightly bittersweet
brownie, add a cup to a cup and a half. I'm just going to sort of meet it in the
middle here. I'm going to go about a cup and ¾ of sugar, and, you know, eh, that's
pretty good. So again, put it in here and you're just going to keep stirring and stirring,
and you'll want to add in your vanilla to help make that sugar work in a little bit
So once you have all of your sugar incorporated and you add your vanilla here and you get
a little bit more liquid, then you are going to...we're going to add about a teaspoon
of vanilla. This is the half teaspoon I've got here. I'm going to add in my teaspoon
of vanilla. Right now it kind of looks like this isn't
going to get very liquidy, but you'll be surprised at what vanilla can do to actually
make things liquidy. So I'm just going to stir this all up, and we'll be right back.
So, after you've put a little elbow muscle into this, and I promise, it's not going
to look like it's going to go together, but if you bear down a little bit and stir
it up, or if you have a mixer, just use your mixer, save your arms, you're going to end
up with a really thick batter that's going to look like this. And the more you stir it,
the more combined things will be, but you want to make sure it's a little bit runny,
because that will make it easier to get it from here to your pan, which is where you're
going to put things next. Now, you can use any kind of a pan that you
want. This is a 9x13, that's how much brownies this is going to make, but if you don't
have a big pan like this you can use two smaller pans, that's fine as well, or even round
cake pans, whatever you have around the house will be just fine. You want to prepare your
pan a little bit for these brownies, even though they have the butter in there and the
fat in there, they're still going to be fairly sticky in your pan. And so there's
a couple different ways that you can prepare your pan. In the US we have the sprays that
you can put on there, if you have olive oil or vegetable oil you can pour that in there,
or, easiest, because you've already used it in the recipe, just take a little bit of
butter, and just rub it in your pan. Make sure that you put it on the bottom of the
pan, and up and around the sides, especially in the corners. The place where brownies stick
the most are going to be in the corners. And it doesn't have to be evenly spread, but
you do want to make sure that you have some butter on every part of the surface. So, that's
what you need to do. I would say if you are looking for how much
to start out with, maybe about a tablespoon of butter, and that's what you need.
Now, I mentioned before that brownies are customizable. If you, right now, took this
brownie batter, put it into this pan, but it in your 350 degree oven, and baked it up,
they would be delicious and everybody would love them. But, there are some things you
can do to make these even more wonderfully delicious.
Let's see, do you have a chocoholic in your family? Well, you can do what I'm going
to do, you can add some chocolate chunks or chocolate chips. That's what we're going
to do today. We've got about a cup, cup and a half of chocolate chips, and just stir
them in. Now, if you have someone in your family who likes tree nuts, so almonds, walnuts,
that kind of thing, right now, that's a good time to add those in. I happen to be
allergic to those, so I don't ever add those in mine, but I hear that brownies with walnuts
are especially good. Do you have someone in your family who loves
coffee or likes mocha flavor? Instead of that ¾ cup boiling water that I burned my fingers
with, you could actually take a half a cup of hot coffee and pour that in instead of
that water, and now you have a delicious mocha brownie. Do you have someone in your family
who likes the flavor of mint together with chocolate? You can, instead of that vanilla,
you can add mint extract. Do you have someone in your family who loves peanut butter? Well,
consider adding peanuts at this stage, or, instead of some of that butter that you added,
actually add in peanut butter. That's going to make your dough even thicker, but it's
going to be even more delicious because peanut butter and chocolate, they just go together.
It's amazing. So, however you want to customize it, come
up with what you like and make sure you put that into your brownies. But do add something,
it really will just make your brownies over the top.
But today, again, we are going for the double-chocolate. Now, I only put in one kind of chocolate chip,
if you've got other kinds of chocolate chips around the house (there's semi-sweet, there's
the dark chocolate variety, there's even mint chips and peanut butter chips. There's
butterscotch chips.) Throw those in there, have a smorgasbord of delicious flavors in
your brownies. So once you've got that folded in together,
you're just going to take that and dump it into your pan. And, you want to, you don't
have to be really careful about it when you're pouring it in, but you do want to make sure
that you're getting some of the batter in all parts of the pan, and so if you have a
spatula around, which, I did before but I seem to have moved it, that's always helpful
in getting the dough out. But if not, just use your spoon. You can also use your fingers,
if you really want to. The joyous thing about using your fingers for this is that you get
to lick them later, and let's just be honest, this is just really delicious. And why else
do we cook but to eat what we cook, so, you might as well. Use your fingers, use your
hands, get messy, this is one of the more delicious things to actually clean up.
So, take all of your brownie mix, make sure you push it over into all of the corners of
your pan, just like that. And the nice thing about when this is baking it's going to
even itself out, so it doesn't have to be exactly perfect.
The last thing that you're going to do, this is sort of my super-secret trick for
getting the air bubbles out and making these as dense and fudgy as they can possibly be.
This is going to be loud, so ready yourself! All that does is it releases some of the air
bubbles in there and lets them come out and helps compress the rest of the dough. So we'll
do it one more time, and that's it! Put these into your pre-heated oven at 350
degrees. You're going to bake them for 25 to 30 minutes. You want to watch these. When
the outside edges are just starting to get brown, just starting to pull away (from the
sides), that's when you're going to want to take these brownies out. These are still
going to continue to cook in the pan when you take them out and let them set to cool
down, but you don't want to overbake them because then they will get dry, and nobody
likes a dry brownie, it's not good, stay away from dry brownies. So just when you see
outside edges starting to get brown and just starting to pull away just a little bit, that's
when you want to take it out. So again, you're going to do between 25 and 25 minutes in a
350 degree Fahrenheit or 180 degree Celsius oven, and we'll show you what they look
like in just a minute. So while your brownies are baking you can
go ahead and start making your frosting. Do you need to make frosting? No you do not,
brownies are delicious without frosting, everyone will love them. Should you make frosting?
Absolutely, because brownies are better with frosting. Without frosting, brownies are great.
With frosting, out of this world. You want to make the frosting and I'm going to show
you how. It's really simple and easy. Once your brownies are out of the oven, let
them cool and then add this frosting on top. We'll show you that in a bit. Five ingredients
for delicious brownie frosting that again can be customized if you want to. You've
got the dry ingredients, you have your powdered sugar, your powdered cocoa again, and then
your wet ingredients; milk, melted butter and vanilla. That's it, very easy.
So you're going to start out with your powdered cocoa. This is going to be about a half a
cup of your powdered cocoa, more or less depending on how chocolaty you want it to be, but about
that is going to be good. Then you're also going to want to add in some of your powdered
sugar. You're going for between 2 and 2/3 of a cup of powdered sugar here. You're
going to put these two in together, but you're not going to put all of this in. Just like
we did with the actual brownies, we're also going to alternate the ingredients with the
brownie frosting. So, we're just going to mix them together,
and once those two ingredients are put together you're just going to add in some of your
wet ingredients. And again, following the alternating pattern, you're going to alternate
between your milk and your butter. So first you're going to add about half of your milk,
and this is 1/3 cup of milk. So just add your milk in, and you're going to stir this around.
Now, you notice I'm using a wire whisk, you don't have to, you can use a spoon,
but I find that whisks are just slightly better for incorporating things into frosting. You're
going to see already, it's not starting to get liquidy yet, but you are starting to
get clumps; that's good. Clumps you want, because eventually those clumps are going
to work themselves out into delicious and smooth frosting.
So once you have your frosting close to liquefied, then you're going to add in some more of
your dry ingredient. Pretty easy, right? And so you're going to stir that around for
a little bit, and eventually you're going to find out that that's pretty hard, because
now what was once wet is now going to start getting dry, and so once you reach the point
where it's getting really hard to stir, like it's getting to be now, you're going
to add in some more of your wet ingredient, so here is your butter. This is about 6 tablespoons
of butter, and again, just add half of it, and just keep stirring. And notice that, once
again, pretty quickly it's going to get very liquidy. And that's what you're going
to do, if you just go back and forth, back and forth between your liquid and your dry
until you get this to be the consistency that you want it to be.
If it's a really humid day out you might actually need less liquid. If it's a really
dry, cold day out, you might need more liquid, it's not an exact science. But as long as
you start out with just over two cups of powdered sugar, a half cup of your chocolate, and a
third cup of butter—er, sorry, a third cup of milk, 6 Tablespoons of butter (which I
think actually is about a third of a cup) and a teaspoon of vanilla, keep stirring them
together, eventually you're going to get a nice, creamy and delicious frosting for
those wonderful brownies. So after 30 minutes in the oven, more or less,
your brownies should look like this: they should be slightly darker around the edges,
just starting to pull away (from the pan) but the center should still have a nice, squishy,
most look—that's what you want in your brownies. You're going to let your brownies
cool as completely as possible. Sometimes, if you're making these to take to someone,
and you sort of run out of time, and you end up having to do this just a little earlier,
but the cooler these brownies get, the easier it is, better it is for putting on your frosting.
So, after you've stirred and stirred and stirred and added in all your ingredients,
this is what your frosting should look like. It should be thick and dense but it should
be easy to smooth out. If your frosting is looking more liquidy, for example, if you
can do this and your frosting is starting to run down the bowl, you probably want to
add a little bit more of your sugar. If you can barely smooth this out at all, that means
that it's just a little bit too dry, you need to add a little bit of milk. So take
time to adjust it to get your frosting to look a little bit like this. You can also
customize this frosting: instead of adding milk, you can add a little bit more coffee
for your mocha brownies. If you want to have the mint flavor not in your brownies but in
your frosting, you can do that too, you can just swap out that vanilla for your mint.
If you want to have peanut butter flavor frosting you can, instead of some of the butter, you
can add some peanut butter. So just play around with it until you find a change on this recipe
that works for you. But this basic recipe is going to work out just great.
Frosting these brownies is super-easy. You take your frosting out of the bowl and you
start to just layer it out on top of your brownies. The nice thing about doing brownies
in a glass pan is you can see how thick your frosting is going on, but it doesn't really
matter, the more the merrier with frosting, frosting is delicious. I don't know if anyone
has ever told you this, but if you haven't found out how delicious frosting is, you should
try it for yourself, because it's pretty amazing.
So you're just going to take the frosting, and if you just use a spatula it really helps
because spatula's are just a little bit more flexible than most knives, and you're
just going to spread it on as thickly or as thinly as you want.
Now, you don't have to use all this frosting, this makes a nice amount of frosting (this
recipe does) so if you have what you feel is too much—some people in my family don't
like to have too much frosting on their brownies—frosting left over is really good if you put it between
two either graham crackers or other types of crackers, put it in the freezer for about
10 minutes, it's really delicious. So if you have leftover frosting you can do that.
Also, if you have people around who might be staring at you longingly, asking for "Please,
just a little bit of the frosting" you can always leave a little bit in the bowl for
them and I'm sure that they would appreciate a little bit of the frosting. But the rest
of it should go on to the brownies. Now, again, brownies are totally customizable.
If you have changed nothing about this recipe, if this is just a chocolate brownie with a
chocolate frosting, you could add something special on the top, so again, if someone likes
the peanut butter flavor, sprinkle some chopped up peanuts on top, or some chopped up walnuts
if you want. If someone wants to have some of the mint flavor you can put some mint chips
on top, same with the peanut butter chips. So you don't have to put those flavors into
the brownies, if you forgot, and then you remember, 'Oh, yeah, so and so really likes
that,' you can sprinkle it on. Also, if you wait until the end to add things, then
you can customize it, you can put half in one and half in the other. Another really
favorite thing that people like to do is put marshmallows on top of this to add sort of
a special flavor. Today, because I have them, and why not, I'm
going to add sprinkles, just to make my brownies just a little bit more festive. And again,
you're just going to sprinkle them on there. And that's it, simple, easy American brownies,
it's all you have to do.