Never Make Brownies from a Box Again

When I was growing up, I thought I wasn't a big brownie fan. fortunately I discovered later in life that I was sorely mistaken. Brownies rock. Brownie batter rocks even more. Upon reflection, I realized that I've never actually attempted to make brownies from scratch. Ever. With all my baking experimentation, this clearly needed to be remedied quickly. I'm headed up to Vermont this weekend to ski (it's going to be 75 degrees there, but you can still ski apparently. Sweetness). So I decided to give some brownies a shot. Firstly, because I hate making things from boxes and I wanted to prove I could manage this tasty treat, and secondly because I've had my sister's brownie dish stowed away in my cabinet for 8 months or so and I'm pretty sure she wants it back. So she'll get it tomorrow, with some yummies inside :)

Ingredients:

1/2 cup butter

1 cup sugar

1 tsp vanilla

2 eggs
1/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder

1/2 cup flour

1/4 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

In a small saucepan, melt the butter, then remove it from heat.

It a large bowl, mix together the melted butter and the sugar. Do this step first, as adding eggs to hot butter will likely result in scrambled eggs.

Add in the eggs and vanilla and whisk together. I took a bit of delight in the fact that this was a 100% manpower mixing job. Take the day off, trusty kitchen aid :)

Add in the dry ingredients. I would suggest doing this bit of stirring with a spoon, and not a whisk, as the thick batter will clump together and become very annoying, very quickly.

Once everything is well mixed, have a taste. seriously. I wasn't sure if the made-from-scratch batter would have quite the same gooey-delicious quality....but it was silly to doubt. MAN is that yummy.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Spread the batter out into a greased 8 x 8 baking dish. Spread it around evenly.

At this point, I chose to top the brownies with some mint chip[s and chocolate chips I've had laying around for a while. I don't think this was necessary at all but, I'm a big fan of the mint chocolate combo so I gave it a whirl.

Bake for 25 minutes. The recipe says it is very crucial not to overbake, so get those puppies outta there and onto a wire rack pronto.

Let cool, slice and enjoy!

P.S. sorry for the crappy pics, my digital camera is pissed about all the saltwater and sand I exposed it to last week. I'm trying to coax it back to life. Thanks for the backup, iPhone.