Chocolate Brownies (Cake Angels, Normal Ingredients)

The Cake Angels brownie made with what is already in the cupboard — butter, plain flour, a teaspoon of baking powder, no xanthan gum. Same five minutes of beating the eggs, same half hour in the oven, and nothing bought specially.

Total time: 1 h 50 min
Prep: 20 min
Cook: 30 min
Serves: 16
Made: 10 times · rated 5/5

Ingredients

200 g (7 oz) good-quality dark chocolate, minimum 60% cocoa solids
200 g (7 oz) butter
2 large eggs, beaten
1 medium egg, beaten
300 g (10½ oz) caster sugar
1½ tsp vanilla extract
100 g (3½ oz) plain flour
1 tsp baking powder
½ tsp salt
35 g (1¼ oz) cocoa powder, plus extra for dusting

Equipment

18 × 27 cm shallow baking tin (7 × 10 1/2 in)
Hand-held electric mixer — the five minutes of beating is what makes these

Instructions

Heat the oven to 160 °C (325 °F), or 140 °C in a fan oven. Grease the tin and line it with baking parchment, leaving enough hanging over the sides to lift the finished slab out by.
Melt the chocolate and butter together in a heatproof bowl — either set over a pan of gently simmering water, with the base of the bowl clear of the water, or in the microwave on high for about 1 1/2 minutes. Stir until the two have melted smoothly together.
Beat the eggs, sugar and vanilla with a hand-held electric mixer on a high speed for about 5 minutes, until the mixture is thick, creamy and pale.
Drop the mixer to its slowest speed and pour in the melted chocolate, mixing only until it is evenly combined.
Sift the flour, baking powder, salt and cocoa powder over the surface and fold them through with long, unhurried strokes. The beaten eggs still do most of the lifting here — the baking powder only backs them up — so the folding is there to keep the air in rather than to mix quickly.
Spoon the mixture into the lined tin, push it evenly into the corners, and level the top with the back of a metal spoon.
Bake for 30 minutes. They will look undercooked when the timer goes and the temptation is to leave them in — don't. Brownies carry on cooking and firm up as they cool.
Cool in the tin for a full hour; the longer you leave them, the more cleanly they cut. Dust lightly with cocoa powder, lift the slab out by the parchment, peel the paper away and let it finish cooling on a wire rack.
Once completely cold, cut into squares — with a large plastic knife if you have one, otherwise a large sharp knife heated in hot water and wiped between cuts, which keeps the whole thing from turning into a gooey mess.

Notes & tips

From the source.

The chocolate is the recipe. The author's stated key is a really good-quality bar with at least 60% cocoa solids. That much is unchanged by the swaps below — it is the one ingredient worth spending on.
Makes 12 to 16 squares. The frontmatter records the upper end.
Better the day after baking, if you can leave them alone that long.
Freezes, per the source's own freeze note.
Serving: on their own with a cup of coffee, or warm with raspberry coulis and ice cream.

My notes

What actually happened when this was cooked.

Made about ten times with these swaps — butter for the dairy-free spread, plain flour for the wheat- and gluten-free blend, and the xanthan gum left out altogether. This is the version that actually gets baked here.
Baking powder replaces nothing in the original, which has no raising agent at all: 1 tsp with the 100 g of plain flour, which is roughly what the same weight of self-raising flour would carry.

Source