Bittersweet Chocolate Pecan Brownies
Before Hawaii: a story and recipe from The Baking Wizard!
Sometimes I want a sweet baked treat but I don’t know what it is specifically. A cookie? Cake maybe? Often a flavor or texture or both might pop into my mind and soon clarity sets in.
A few days ago I found myself in this pleasant quandary when I suddenly remembered a brownie recipe I hadn’t baked for 35 years: Greenwich Village Brownies from Maida Heatter’s Book of Great Cookies (Knopf, 1977). The recipe makes a huge panful of thick, fudgy brownies with caramel overtones, and that was my starting point.
I decided to cut the recipe in half because it has nuts, and my wife does not like brownies with nuts. And I didn’t want a huge batch of brownies staring me in the face to tempt me every time I walked by.
I tweaked the recipe by ramping up the chocolate, adding a tad of instant coffee, a bit more vanilla, and substituting agave syrup for light corn syrup to give the brownies a hint of toffee. Success!
Go ahead, make your day!