My First Brownie!

So... I've never made brownies. I've made a mini 4-layer cake, chicken marsala, caramels aux beurre salé, conchas and a whole slew of other stuff... but I've never made brownies. Apparently they're so easy that, according to my friend T, there's no reason to have brownie box mixes. But I was scared; I wanted the perfectly dense, chewy brownie that the Yogurtland in Tustin makes (By the way, if there's any Yogurtland you visit, it should be that one. Support.) They make their own because my friend's parents are co-owners of that franchise branch and one night when I went to her house to hang out her dad made us make them and take them to their Yogurtland. Needless to say, I decided to make brownies because I wanted to copy them.

Because I was too scared to take the plunge and make it from scratch, because I've never envisioned brownies being made from anything but a box mix, I bought Ghirardelli mix. I followed the instructions (mostly), and omitted half the chocolate syrup, replacing it with a secret ingredient I hoped would catapult the brownies to the level of my friend's dad's brownies. And then I baked them. Until there were bits and pieces of brownie on the bamboo toothpick I used to test their doneness.

The recipe Most recipes tell you to wait until the brownies are completely cooled to cut them. Are you kidding me!? By the time those things cool they'll probably all have disappeared, leaving only little crumbs. (I'm actually half-serious about this; my mother once liked some cookies I made so much that she ate all the ones I had just finished baking and she took the reserve dough back to her apartment to make for her bf so he could eat them too).

Wait...

Wait...

Wait...

So um... they're not... dense enough. Chewy, but not... dense... like dense enough that the interior doesn't actually look like cake, but looks like striated layers of rock in brownie form. But not fudgy. Just really really chewy. But for my first brownies, they look pretty awesome, don't they? One day, brownie, I'll make you so awesomely brownie lovers will ask for my autograph. Huahahaha!!!