To my crime family: Matteo and Sabina, you were good parents and taught me how to be a shrewd business owner and baker. To my brothers Marco, Carlos, Vincenzo, and Amadeo: your relentless bullying gave me a tough skin that is needed to live in Chicago in the 1950s. I hope you are all proud of me.
I’ve spent most of my life searching for the perfect Chocolate Chip Cookie.
It’s a whole story that involves Mrs Fields, babysitting, my aunt marrying an island boy from Tahiti, and coming to terms with the past.
But this story is surprisingly NOT about my first favorite dessert in the world… but the second.
The Brownie
I love how chocolatey brownies are
How they taste best a little bit underbaked
How they have to cool before you can eat them
How they taste good with or without frosting
I have always loved a good brownie… and when I say “good brownie” I’m talking about the cheap Betty Crocker box mix.
A box brownie mix has always been good enough for me… and I was so busy focusing on perfecting my cookie recipe that I just didn’t have the time or care to work on a recipe for the brownie.
Until one night.
Actually more like a month.
Two significant things happened
The first was that I suddenly came to an awareness that my body decided that it would no longer process/digest/accept boxed brownies. If I really wanted a brownie I was signing up to be violently ill for 5 hours.
This new digestive development could be what paved the way for a second significant moment…
The night that changed everything.
Every few years I have a VIVID dream.
A dream that’s so real it permanently changes my behavior and personality.
One night in 2022 I had one of those dreams. And it did change me forever as a person.
The setting was Chicago
The year: 1950
You know how in dreams you just know certain things? Nothing is explained to you but somehow someway you just know what’s going on?
Well in this dream I just knew that I was part of one of the biggest, most successful, most revered, and feared Crime Families in the entire city of Chicago.
I recognized nobody in the dream but somehow I knew they were my family.
My crime family consisted of my beautiful mother Sabina, my loving but terrifying father Matteo, four insane reckless brothers… and then me.
We all had the most stunning amazing black pinstripe suits and we ruled the city of Chicago.
I had a knowing in the dream that we did all the crimey murderey stuff that you read about in books.
I knew we broke the law and killed and smuggled drugs and guns through the black market.
But I also knew that my father and brothers kept me out of that part of the business because they thought I couldn’t handle it.
So what was my job in the family?
Running the undercover, top secret, family brownie business in the basement of a run-down building in Chicago.
I know this sounds made up or like a book but to this day I can still vividly remember what this basement looked like.
In the dream, I worked the counter of what looked like a beauty salon and helped the “customers” that came in and used coded language to order my family’s bronies.
I worked long hours which means that I saw the brownies, smelled the brownies, touched the brownies, and felt the weight of them in my hand.
The one thing that I never did in the dream…. Was taste them.
If you saw the same brownie that I saw in my dream… you would do ANYTHING to have it.
After helping one of my last customers at the end of a long day, placing her four perfectly square and perfect-looking brownies in a box…
I suddenly woke up in a sweat.
Heart pounding, body chilled, head swimming
Not because the customer I was helping had worked with my father to take out another crime boss…
But because I knew that my life trajectory would be permanently changed after that dream.
I would do anything to see that brownie again… and to know what it tasted like.
I took this dream as a sign
Not to move to Chicago
Not to start a life of crime
And not to replace my wardrobe with amazing pinstripe black suits
But to start the Official Crime Family Brownie Experiment
I immediately began my research pouring through food blogs, Pinterest, and the internet attempting to understand the chemical composition of brownies, baking time, chocolate percentages, and refrigeration times.
During the whole process, one thing was clear in my mind…
I wasn’t looking for the perfect brownie… the one the New York Times publishes on their website and that influencers rave about.
I was looking for the brownie I saw in a Chicago basement in 1950.
The thing about experiments though is that sometimes they don’t have a conclusion.
So while I feel I have come close to what I saw in my vivid dream… I’m always afraid to officially end the experiment… because ending the experiment would also be ending the ties I have with my Chicago family.
The dream did determine three things that are very important… nay essential to having the same brownie that people in 1950 Chicago were eating.
- Pan
- Shape
- Frosting
1. Pan
Sometime during the years 1950-1990 every woman on the planet started to buy glass Pyrex dishes in bulk. Every woman needed a 9×9, 8×11, 2×15, 4×42, 9×12, and 50×67.
These glass pans are wonderful (especially for baked goods & casseroles) but the edges of these glass pans are curved.
One thing I remember from my dream and something I believe to be true about brownies is that
DON’T NO BROWNIE DESERVE A CURVED EDGE
Brownies need to be straight, and precise, with edges so crisp they could cut paper.
The sharper the shape the more appetizing the brownie.
So glass pans, curved edges, and any round shape at all for brownies… ARE A BIG FAT NO
What you need is a metal pan, with edges that are so pointy they could take out your eye.
This is the one I would recommend.
Did I really spend $25 dollars on a small pan to bake brownies when I had perfectly good glass pans to use?
Absolutely I did. And you would too if you had the same vivid dream that I did.
2. Shape
The shape is intimately related to the pan. Since scientists have recently discovered that sugar is unhealthy people have begun serving desserts in extremely small quantities. I’ve seen people stretch a 9×9 brownie pan into 16 brownie squares.
In the dream, people didn’t risk their lives in crime-riddled Chicago to come to a Beauty Salon front just to get a small brownie square cut with a jagged piece of crap knife.
No, they came for the most beloved crime family’s secret brownie recipe.
Which meant they wanted a real-deal massive square.
In the dream, one 9×9 pan was cut into FOUR pieces. That means that one serving was a massive gigantic, heavy square.
I realize that some people will not be able to accept such a large piece of chocolate as a serving size so I’m willing to say that to cut one 9×9 pan into 9 pieces is barely acceptable… but any smaller than that and you are ruining the nature of the brownie itself.
So the brownie needs to be a massive square and it needs to be cut with the sharpest knife possible so it has a clean crisp edge.
This means that you absolutely cannot under any circumstances cut the brownies right when they come out of the oven…. or an hour after they come out of the oven or even 3 hours after they come out of the oven.
Brownies need to be fully completely cooled, frosted, and slightly chilled before they can resemble what they looked like in the dream.
3. Frosting
Brownies are better than cake because they taste good and are socially acceptable to eat with or without frosting.
However, in the dream, the brownies had frosting and lots of it. But the frosting was the same color OR DARKER than the brownie itself. It wasn’t vanilla buttercream with a teaspoon of cocoa powder… it was basically chocolate itself.
So the Crime Family Brownie has frosting on it. And because it’s frosted it requires the brownies to be fully cooled, and slightly chilled and for the frosting to set before they can be served.
So without further ado here are the latest results of the Crime Family Brownie Experiment.
This recipe would have been top secret in 1950 but times have changed and I’m not living a life of crime and I believe in sharing good things with the world. Hopefully, my crime family would agree.
THE Chicago Family Crime Family Brownie Recipe (for now)
- 1 cup unsalted butter
- ½ cup semi-sweet chocolate morsels
- 2 cups granulated sugar
- 4 large eggs
- 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
- ¾ cup unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 cup all-purpose flour
- ½ teaspoon kosher salt
- ½ teaspoon baking powder
- Preheat oven to 350°F. Line a 9-inch METAL baking dish (WITH STRAIGHT SIDES) with parchment paper. Set aside.
- In a medium-sized saucepan, melt butter over medium heat. Remove from heat and add in chocolate chips and sugar.
- Stir until chocolate is completely melted. Add in eggs, one at a time, stirring completely after each addition. Stir in vanilla.
- Add the cocoa powder, flour, salt, and baking powder. Using big strokes, stir in JUST until mixed and no longer see dry ingredients. DO NOT BEAT OR OVERSTIR.
- Pour batter into dish and bake for about 35 minutes. Remove from oven and cool completely before cutting.
THE Chicago Crime Family Frosting Recipe (for now)
- 1 Stick butter
- 1/2 Cup cocoa powder
- 1/2 Cup milk
- 1 Tsp. vanilla
- 1 Cup powdered sugar
- Melt butter and cocoa.
- Heat milk to warm.
- Add cocoa and butter to sugar in mixing bowl.
- Add hot milk to spreading thickness desired.
- Remove from heat and immediately stir in vanilla and cocoa powder. Beat until icing is smooth and starts to lose its shine. Pour onto brownies 2 hours after brownies have cooled.
- Let frosted brownies cool before serving. Chill in fridge if you like having cold dessert. In the dream, the brownies were served slightly cooled because the temperature of the basement was always 62 degrees.
Just know that if you use this recipe you are basically doing something illegal.
And bringing pride to my crime family name.
I eagerly wait for the night when I sleep hard enough and can revisit my crime family again and tell them that I brought the brownie back to life. Hopefully, then Marco, Carlos, Vincenzo, and Amadeo will finally be proud of me and stop treating me like their incapable weak younger sister.