There are many types of food that I can resist, and brownies is one of them.  I am attracted to foods by the pure curiosity of experiencing a new taste, re-experiencing a tried and true taste, and that’s about it.  If I see something that I know already has a particular taste and it’s not one I love, I can say no.  That’s how I feel about brownies.  That’s how I feel about chocolate in general.  I am not a choco-holic.  My sidekick is, and wherever I go, I always bring him back chocolate bars.  I never ever ever touch them, unless I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel (or I want to do something to SPITE him).  My one chocolate exclusion is chocolate cake.  And in fact, for the longest time, I was drawn to tasting brownies as they happened across my path in the hopes of finding a cake-y brownie instead of the dense fudgy kind.  One day I was discussing this with my friend and Brownie expert, Little Baker Bunny, and she said, “You know, I HATE IT when people say they like cake-y brownies.  A brownie isn’t supposed to be cake-y.  It’s supposed to be dense and fudgy.  That’s why it’s a BROWNIE.  If you want cake, why don’t you just eat cake?”  And that sealed the deal for me.  She was right.  Why waste time HOPING to find a cake-y brownie?  Just go straight for the cake.

But there are times when having the quintessential brownie recipe is useful.  By quintessential, I mean you’ve got all the ingredients, not a lot of time, and your butter is frozen.  (My butter is always frozen.  Because if it’s not, I’ll be tempted to use it, but also because it is made at the farm down the road and doesn’t last long.  I buy pounds of butter at a time and freeze it in 225g bars in the freezer.)  I wrote to Little Baker Bunny and asked “I need a recipe that uses melted butter and chocolate, not cocoa.”  She rattled off a couple, and I stopped at the Recchiuti Fudgy Brownie recipe.  I topped the brownies with an icing I had recently discovered when shooting a recipe for my In the Kitchen With column and delivered it to work.  It was a smashing success.  S M A S H I N G.

But you know, I feel guilty when I prepare something for someone else, but not for my sidekick, so I ordered a few more pounds of butter, and made a pan of brownies for him too.  THAT was my downfall.  Now I had time to look at that stupid pan of brownies from morning to night.  And while the people at work had described what the brownie was like in painstaking detail (and I wasn’t at all moved), I just had to taste these because…well this is the third reason I am attracted to food:  I need to know how the recipe comes out so that if I’m ever looking to make THAT particular item, I can call it up in my memory…and then make it.

And so I tasted it.  A tiny corner.  But the corner is hard.  It’s more cooked than the center.  I really needed to get to the center.  The corner is also the exact reason I hate brownies.  And so I waited for my sidekick to get home and poked and prodded him into trying it.  And that paved the way for me to get a shot at the center.  And I did.  And it…was sooo good.  The icing was just as I had intended–  hardened, but soft and rich and flaky.  The crumb was moist and dense, and the chunks of dark chocolate were quite wonderful contrasts to the soft surrounding brownie.  Between yesterday and today I ate about a 2-inch square.  And it completely killed my appetite.  So I thought I’d come up with a brownie diet.  1 square inch a day and that’s all you eat.  And then I remembered what the doctor said.  If I eat cake, even one piece, I will spontaneously combust.  OK.  That’s not what he said, but that’s what I heard, but I know he is a liar because I’m still here to write about it.  But I teetered on the edge of addiction when that chocolate hit my tongue and I knew I just knew that if I didn’t keep reminding myself how much I really don’t like brownies, I’d be sunk.

Having dietary restrictions is a drag.  A big fat drag in the mud.  Dabbling in food photography, you’re always surrounded by images of food.  Having a sidekick who loves to eat but stays skinny, you’re always happy to make great food.  And until now, I was able to resist.  Chew gum.  Talk myself down from the ladder which lets me get at all the hidden foods…

As a brownie hater, I am now sitting trying to figure out if that brownie was so good because it was good, or if it was good because I haven’t really had sweets (except for a spare cookie and a couple or ten nibbles of a pound cake I was testing for someone else) in almost 2 months or…  OK, it’s good.  It’s really good.  It is quite fine, like Idris Elba fine.  Not quite as good as Ruffle’s potato chips, savory cheesecake, or French fries, or my favorite chocolate cake recipe though, because I have managed to not eat any more and not crave it, no disrespect to Idris…  but if you need a brownies recipe, this is definitely one to use.  Whether it is the one they use at Recchiuti, I am not certain.  But if you want to know about the fantastic icing, you’ll have to read my column this Friday (2 April) at design*sponge to see.