Last time you got an article with no recipe. This one is going to be almost the opposite – Unlike my previous articles, where a recipe was mainly to showcase a point I was trying to make, this one is really about the recipe.

But, because this is me, I can’t help but include some pointless waffle as a prelude. Feel free to skip to the recipe if you don’t want my words of wisdom. :-)

Firstly, this is a family recipe – there are about three people in my immediate family who make this for their friends on a regular basis (me, my mother and my sister), and we’re all famous among them for it. So, I’m betraying a deep and sacred trust in giving this to you. I hope you appreciate it.

Secondly, there’s a quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that is often passed around in design circles. “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” (this is a translation rather than an exact quote. The original french reads “La perfection est atteinte non quand il ne reste rien à ajouter, mais quand il ne reste rien à enlever.”). This recipe is an excellent example of this – I’ve seen lots of complicated brownie recipes, involving melted chocolate, vanilla, walnuts, whatever. These are better.

Ingredients

250g butter
4 eggs
1 cup cocoa
1 cup flour
2 cups white sugar

I often use margarine in place of the butter but, to be completely honest, the ones with butter are better. They’re still very good with margarine, but the butter makes them even better. (To borrow another quote, “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between lightning and lightning bug”. It’s allegedly from Mark Twain, but as Mark Twain said “It is a poor man indeed who cannot make up a Mark Twain quote to serve his purpose”).

Cooking

Melt the butter on a low heat. Once the butter is melted, take it off the heat. Add the sugar and cocoa and mix until smooth (I’m lazy, so I usually use an electric mixer for this), then add the eggs and flour gradually, continuing to mix as you do so.

Once everything is added in and the mixture is smooth, transfer it to a medium sized greased baking tray. Bake at around 180C (a little on the low side of this perhaps) for 20-30 minutes. Rather than relying on timing, the brownies are cooked when a sharp knife poked into the middle comes out clean.

Leave to cool for a little bit and then cut into appropriately sized brownies. Transfer all the ones which do not mysteriously vanish during the cutting process to an air tight tin or something – these don’t need to be refrigerated, but keeping them in a relatively cool place in a tin is neccesary to stop them going stale.