Dark Chocolate Fudge Brownies from Butternut Bakery

Dark Chocolate Fudge Brownies - made February 17, 2023 from Butternut Bakery

3/4 cup (170 grams) unsalted butter

6 ounces 60% bittersweet chocolate, chopped

1 1/2 teaspoons instant espresso

1/2 cup (100 grams) dark brown sugar, packed

1/2 cup (100 grams) granulated sugar

3 large eggs, room temperature

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

3/4 cup (92 grams) whole wheat flour

1/3 cup (25 grams) dutch-process cocoa powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

4-5 ounces 70-80% dark chocolate, coarsely chopped

1. Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Line 8 x 8-inch pan with foil and lightly spray with nonstick cooking spray.
2. In a large mixing bowl, add the chopped bittersweet chocolate.
3. In a heavy saucepan, melt butter, stirring constantly, until butter is browned. Pour hot butter over chopped bittersweet chocolate and whisk to combine until chocolate is melted. Whisk in espresso powder then brown sugar and granulated sugar until combined. Let cool for several minutes before whisking in eggs and vanilla extract.
4. In a separate bowl, whisk together whole wheat flour, cocoa and salt.
5. Add dry ingredients to chocolate mixture and stir to combine. Add half of the dark chocolate. Pour batter into prepared pan and smooth into an even layer. Top with remaining dark chocolate. Bake 20-25 minutes or until a toothpick inserted near the center comes out with a few moist crumbs, not raw batter.
6. Let cool completely before cutting and serving.

One of my old college roommates, Caroline, gifted me a number these organic, Fair Trade chocolate bars, both 71% and 48% cacao, this past Christmas. I love getting high quality baking ingredients as gifts (really, they're the best things you can give a baker) and I started using them in various baking experiments. 

These brownies look frosted in some pictures but they're not. I chopped up one of the 71% cacao bars and sprinkled them on top of the brownie before baking. They melted over the top so they look like pure chocolate frosting.

I'm not a dark chocolate person per se although I do prefer dark chocolate brownies to milk chocolate brownies. But I prefer milk chocolate in straight chocolate form over semisweet or bittersweet or dark chocolate.

These were good but, you guessed it, I still prefer my go-to brownie recipe as being thicker, more dense and more fudgy. At some point, I will likely give up trying out new recipes for brownies as I simply prefer my go-to recipe over any other.

I think what threw me with these is the slightly gritty texture. That's from the whole wheat flour. Or my imagination. These had a slightly softer crumb than my go-to recipe. The pools of chocolate melted over the top contributed to their richness. Scattering chunks of chocolate bars yields a different result than scattering chocolate chips over the top. At room temperature, chocolate chips remain solid in their original form. Chocolate bars soften, melt and even when they re-solidify at room temperature, they still tend to remain soft. At least, these new chocolate bars I used did.