evil brownies

BROWNIES!   Whooo-hooo!    come on, they are brownies!

seriously, i had a hard time finding a recipe i liked.   i have a great one i always used in idaho.   it was a cocoa recipe.   i got my cocoa in a bulk buying co-op thing we did every year so it wasn't expensive at all.   i bought at least 5lbs every year for about $12.   can't beat that!   no such thing here, (at least that i've found).   thus, we haven't made brownies since we moved to germany.   i miss them!   by the way, germans love brownies!   which is kind of funny since they aren't much for really sweet stuff.   most american cakes and cookies are too sweet.   weird.   back to brownies - i tried several recipes and eventually, i just tweaked one.   this one actually.    i love that it has nutella and peanut butter.   nuts are healthy, right?   this is actually really chocolaty, not the sweet  chocolate but brownie chocolate.   they are so dang good that they are evil.   the first batch i made, i burned.   common at our house.   they were still delicious!   after that, we made 3 more batches for the kids to take to school.   didn't burn any of those.

melt together on a medium low heat-

1 c butter 

2 c sugar

2 tsp vanilla

mix up your dry stuff and let those melt -

1 1/3 c flour

3/4 c chocolate milk mix

1/2 tsp baking powder

1/8 tsp salt

back to the melting pot 

add and melt and mix in - 

1/2 c nutella (i use the cheaper generic hazelnut cocoa spread)

1/2 c peanut butter

1 bar of dark chocolate (mine was 100grams so about 3.5 oz) i don't think the entire bar made it in once.   someone snitched a couple pieces every batch.   gotta pay the help i guess.

after everything is all melted in, take it off the heat and let it cool for a minute and add -

4 eggs

the recipe i used said to add one and stir then add the next etc.   i guess that's to keep it from cooking in the hot mix.   i had a helper so he whisked and i added eggs.

the original recipe says greased 9x13 for 30-40 min at 350*.   all i have is a 11' round and a 8 1/2x12, they worked fine.   the brownies ended up thicker and probably more dense than if they had been in  aslightly larger pan.   and i had to bake closer to 45 minutes.

i greased and put bake paper in the bottom of the last 3 batches.   the first one stuck pretty bad, i miss my stoneware).   on the upside, i am now a bake paper convert!  i think i'm a genius for using something hundreds of thousands of people have used for who knows how long.   (really, i looked and could not find out when vegetable parchment began being used for baking.   i did find when it was invented though, 1846.   it was probably way too expensive for people to use as a throw away under cake at that time though.   if your into weird useless history/science information like i am, you can read about it  here.   cupcake paper started in the 50's though, so i'm thinking bake paper before that.

my brownies cooling by the window in my pantry.   safely away from little blonde curls and chocolate loving cats.

 this is the coolest invention ever!   ok, there are a lot more useful things, but this is still awesome!   i use it to cut pizza, cookies, brownies obviously.   i'm just showing it off

yum!   evil brownies!

BWAH-HAHAHAHAHAHA!