Troll Cave

I know I claimed it was against my religion (or something like that) to tell people what was or was not the “best” of anything. So. . .

(1) I didn’t name them this. It’s not my fault, I swear!

(2) Even if I had named them this, I would make an exception for these brownies. You have to make an exception for these brownies. They are the standard by which all other brownies are judged. Make these brownies and you will never, ever again say “Why bother make them from scratch? It’s so much faster from a box, and they taste just as good!”

Not.

You simply don’t understand the full meaning of the word “brownies” until you’ve had these. Come with me on the path to enlightenment, my friend. This is where the good life starts:

5 1/3 sticks butter
5 1/3 cups sugar
2 tablespoons vanilla
6 eggs
2 2/3 cups flour
2 cups cocoa
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
dash of salt salt (original called for 1 1/2 tsp., but I never do)
2 2/3 cups chopped nuts (optional, if you’re allergic or don’t have them. Otherwise, stand up straight and take your medicine!! Or not.)

And this, my friend, is the foundation of all life:

Melt your 5 1/3 sticks of butter.

One time someone had these, and the boys heard her raving about them to someone else. The list of wonderful attributes included everything from tasting good, curing cancer, and being low-fat.

Whoa, now! Not low fat. Not on your life.

Curing cancer, maybe, but no, not low-fat.

See, the problem with a lot of brownie recipes is they either make them too sweet or too chocolatey, or both. I know some of you are crying “Heresy! Burn her at the stake!” when I say too chocolatey, but have you ever had chocolate that is 98% cocao? There is such a thing as too much of a good thing. You can’t enjoy it when it’s that powerful; the human senses weren’t designed to take it. It’s like being hit over the head with a sledge hammer. I have had a lot of low-fat brownies that were simply too intense. It was like eating cocoa out of the box. I think they were attempting to compensate for the lack of fat by distracting you with such powerful doses of chocolate.

Anyway, my point was, this recipe is in balance. You will not be killed by over-doses. Unless you eat a lot of them. Each bite is balanced. How many you eat is the point of your own responsibility. I bear absaloutely one hundred percent no responsibility if you eat both 15×10 pans of brownies yourself, in one sitting. That’ll probably take you down. But you will die happy.

We do believe in sugar around here:

Put your 5 1/3 cups of sugar in a great big ol’ bowl.

Yes, I have dirt under my thumbnail. That’s the real home-place of life. I was starting seeds earlier in the day. But don’t worry, it was sterile seedstarting mix. Sterile, ya hear?! It means everything in the dirt was killed dead. It’s clean dirt. Don’t worry about it.

If it bugs you, remember to clean out under your nails before you make this recipe. Me? I’m a Troll. And I bake for Barbarians.

Pour your melted butter on top of the sugar.

This is the foundation of all that is good and right in the world. . .

Now add your 2 tablespoosn vanilla. The real stuff, not the fake stuff.

Did you know that every vanilla flower lasts for only a day—and sometimes less? And that every blossom has to be hand pollinated? There is one type of bee that will pollinate vanilla blossoms, but they don’t believe in being exported. So all the vanilla plantations need every single flower (and ONE flower equals ONE bean) pollinated by hand.

Oy.

You can read more about it here.

Thar. I hath educated you. You’ll never again look at vanilla in the same way.

Stir it all together. . .

When you’re all done mixing it, it should basically look like. . .

. . .applesauce!! Isn’t that funny?

I always think that’s funny.

It’s especially funny ’cause lots of low-fat brownie recipes use applesauce as a fat replacement. There, applesauce masqurades ad fat. Here, fat masqurades as applesauce. Tee-hee!

Nobody gets my sense of humor.

Now you have to add in your half-a-dozen eggs.

Mix it all together with sturdy spoon.

If you don’t have a sturdy spoon, get one. You need it like, um, like birds need feathers. You and they will have a much easier time of accomplishing what you need to do.

Actually, if you don’t have a sturdy spoon, you can use an electric mixer here. But later on in this recipe, YOU WILL NEED TO USE A SPOON! Brownies are allergic to overmixing. It doesn’t matter till we get the flour added in, but once that flour is wet, you must learn the meaning of gentle.

Even if you are a barbarian.

Okay, before we get any further in our mess-making, we need to attend to some other important matters.

Like thoroughly greasing two 15×10 pans with lots of butter. No sissy baking spray. The real deal, man.

Another important matter is preheating the oven to 350.

Guess what? It really is 8:54. PM. Isn’t that awful?

I mean, it was when I took the picture. It isn’t right now.

Actually, it wasn’t when I took that picture. I forgot. We set all of our clocks ahead by 15 or 20 minutes.

Because it’s funny, that’s why.

Why not?

It’s our own little safe, secure alternate universe. No one in the world is on the same time as us.

And then we have one clock set to real time, and then we always get confused when we’re talking about time.

“When you said we should leave by 9 o’clock, did you mean real-time, or kitchen-clock-time?”

So it was probably closer to 8:35.

Real time.

Anyway, I blame that as the reason why all my pictures were blurry this time. The barbarians would undoubtably say that I ought to make brownies all over again and take better pictures, but guess what? These pictures have been sitting on the hard drive for almost a year now. If I am ever going to educate this world to the secret of happiness, it’s now or never!!

(And, no, I did not have a sudden break-down need for brownies; the boys needed to take them to work for a party the next day. I’m sure there is some reasonable reason why I’m doing it sooooooo [kinda] late at night. Like maybe they forgot to tell me until they came home that evening. Or something. I don’t really remember, but neither do they, so I’m pretty sure I can make up whatever reality I want. So they didn’t tell me until 15 minutes previous sounds like a good reason to me.

I am pretty sure them taking my brownies to work is the only reason they are so popular and famous.

And I am pretty sure no one will argue with that, because guess what? Not arguing with that is a good way to get more brownies.)

Now it’s time to mess with dry ingredients. In a seperate, smaller bowl, add your 2 2/3 cups of flour.

Now add the cocoa. 2 cups of it.

And you thought I didn’t believe in chocolate!! Hah!

The reason why we can get away with adding almost as much cocoa as flour without killing ourselves is because of this:

It’s all about balance, man. Yin and Yang. Harmony and love. All that good stuff. No, really!

I don’t know if you have ever noticed it before or not, but if you put a scant 1/8th of a teaspoon of cayene powder in a thin broth, it burns your throat going down. However, if you really load the cayene onto a piece of chicken, and that deep-fat fry it, it’s much more mild. Or if you put an 1/8th of a tsp. of cayene into a creamy-based sauce—you’ll find that a lot more mild than the 1/8th of a tsp. in a fatless broth. Fat has a reconciling effect on powerful flavors. If you put this much cocoa in a lowfat brownie, you will have trouble trying to figure out what the difference is between making brownies and skipping the fuss and bother and just eating cocoa out of the box. The same goes for the sugar.

All this butter makes the ingredients play nice. They’re just too harsh, otherwise. Too bossy, too overpowering. You should try it; if you know someone who is too harsh, too bossy or too overpowering, get them to eat these brownies. It’ll probably work.

As long as their mouths are full.

Anyway!

Add in your 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder. 1 1/2 teaspoons is the same thing as half a tablespoon, did you know that?

Probably not. Most people don’t even make 1/2 tablespoon measurers any more. It’s like they don’t expect people to be using 1 1/2 tbl. of ingredients. What do they know?

Oh, yeah. Add a dash of salt.

People nowadays use too much salt. Name three places you can eat out (or three prepared processed packaged foods) whose predominate flavor is NOT salt. And then tell me, ’cause I can’t do it. Salt is good when used in moderation. Does anyone know what moderation even is any more?

Guess what, guys. I just put 5 1/3 sticks of SALTED butter in there. It doesn’t need a whole lot more salt.

Mix the whole mess up:

Try to get your cocoa lumps out now, because you won’t have a second chance once we add the dry ingredients to wet ingredients. If you’re really worried about it, you can sift it. If you’re not, you can have little lumps of dry cocoa in your finished batter, and that’s okay. You won’t even be able to notice them in the finished brownie. The cocoa soaks up all that butter. . .

Anyway, this is what it looks like when I’m done stirring them together:

Now we have to chop the nuts. Even if you don’t believe in nuts.

Just kidding. These brownies are borderline miraculous even without nuts. They’re just even better with nuts. We use walnuts, because for the longest time they were the cheapest. Now, who knows? But our palate has already been trained to think that nuts in brownies = walnuts, so that’s what I do. Feel free to use pecans. Or almonds. Or peanuts. Or pistachios. Or even leave them out, I guess, but I think you’re really missing out.

I chop them by hand, because that works best. No, really! If you try to use the food processor, you get big chunks and saw dust! And chopping them by hand is really very easy, and very fast.

This is what it looks like after I chop up 1 1/3 cups, and think, “There! I’m done.” Then I remember, “Oh, yeah, I’m making two 15×10 pans! I need to cut up twice this!”

That’s better.

Yes, the picture is blurry and out of focus. It was after 9 o’clock at night, for goodness sakes. Besides, that camera hates me.

And now the magic begins! Behold, the marriage of wet and dry ingredients!

The Fleur de Lis continually protests “sugar” being counted as a wet ingredient.

This is the part where you MUST NOT USE AN ELECTRIC MIXER! YOU MUST USE A SPOON! Using an electric mixer at this point will help you acheive hockey pucks. Not slightly chewy, melt in your mouth brownies.

Stir gently. . .

STOP!! That’s good enough! Yes, there are little lumplets of cocoa. Lumpettes. But we do not under any circumstance try to get them out now. If we keep stirring till we get them worked out, we will have doggy-chew toys. Remember that now: we’re making brownies, not doggy-chew toys.

Now add the nuts:

You may be wondering why we didn’t add the nuts back with the dry ingredients. After all, we’re supposed to be spending as little time as possible on the whole mixing deal, now that the wet has joined the dry. Problem is, if we add the nuts with the dry ingredients, the nuts like to protect little pockets of dry ingredients. So instead of biting into the brownie and—Oh! a walnut!, we get—Oh! a pocket of nasty-tasting baking powder. Not nice. So the nuts have to go in by themselves. But still. Don’t fuss too much about perfect distribution. Close enough is good enough.

Then spread it in your two greased pans. . .

See how stiff it is? Don’t sweat it if yours is considerably looser. When you use so much butter, the consistancy of your batter is largely detirmined by the temperature in the room. Winter brownie batter is much stiffer than summer brownie batter, because the warm weather keeps the butter sooooft. But both summer and winter brownies are spectacular. After all, they both wind up in the oven.

Isn’t that lovely? What could possibly be more comforting than a glowing oven full of brownies?

They need to stay in there for about 25 minutes, but that’s just a ball-park number. When you have this much oven space taken up, you really need to switch things around half-way through, to keep one edge from being burned while the middle edge is still a little under-cooked.

You want the edge of the brownie to be firm and crispy, BUT NOT THE CENTER! These will continue to firm up once they’re out of the oven—as they say, if they’re done in the oven, they’re overdone. The top will be crisped over, but if you push on it, it will give way readily.

Basically, they should like this:

Or this:

Or even this:

No matter which way you look at it, they still look good.

Technically, you should wait until they’re at room temperature before you cut them. Only problem: waiting.

Cooled, they well be just a touch more chewy, and hold themselves together well. Hot, they tend to fall apart.

I had to package them up for traveling before I went to bed, so I cut them while still strongly warm—not quite falling apart, but not as firm as they will be at complete cool down.

And did you know these brownies are prescription strength anti-depressants? Downside: very short lived. I think the depression comes back as soon as you finish eating the brownies. Upside? No one has ever reported suicidal thoughts while consuming these brownies.

No pictures as proof, but I recently hosted a pie party. This is where I provide the dough and apples, everyone brings their own pie plates, and we peel and cut apples till everyone has their pies. I made enough dough to use up about 5 lbs. of shortening and 7 lbs of flour, and all told we peeled and cut 90 cups of apples. Between the three of us. And they each only took home one pie. So we’re eating the rest. But we’re not complaining.

Though you actually can eat apple pie to the point you don’t feel like eating any more apple pie. Even if you are a barbarian.

Though this is technically a non-meat meal, somehow it gets full pass from the barbarians. I think it’s because it has pasta in it, and though I’ve never quite understood the redeeming qualities of pasta, they appear to be quite powerful. (Barbarians will even eat fish if it’s a pasta sauce. I’ll have to share that one with you, sometime.)

But this is a barbarians meal in more ways than one. It is also easy enough that the barbarians can actually make it themselves! Yessiree, it’s a red-letter recipe.

This is the first recipe I train people to cook on. At as young as 3 or 4 years old, kids can begin helping, grating cheese or stirring the sauce. By the time they’re seven, they need supervision and some instruction, but can do most of it themselves. By the time they’re 9 or 10, they’ve basically got it down pat. They need help remembering the exact amount of flour and butter to use, and someone else to transport the 3 gallons of water from sink to stove, but they can be left pretty much on their own.

And by the time they’re 18 or 19, and they suddenly find themselves on their own (albeit even just for a few days), they can fall back on this recipe to survive. The Martlet discovered pasta in the pantry, and made this meal from memory. He even managed to scale the recipe down to one pound, which he found made a sufficient lunch and dinner—half at either meal. And trust me, if he can do it, you can too. Cook it, I mean. I don’t know about eating half a pound of it in one sitting. At any rate, it’s a recipe bachelor’s could survive upon, and it’s good, which, for a bachelor’s recipe, is pretty shocking.

And so, without further ado, here’s the cast of characters:

For the cheese sauce, you have:

1 stick + 1 TB butter
1/2 + 1 TB flour
4 1/2 cups milk
1 1/2 lbs. cheddar cheese (we like extra sharp)

Brilliant in it’s simplicity.

Once you’ve ascertained that you have the necessary ingredients to proceed, the first thing you’ll need to do is fill up a big pot with water. Preferable a 3-gallon pot. This is how you do it:

Then you realize taking pictures of water is fun. Look, I can catch the ripples of a water drop on camera!

Look at the reflections in the water!

Then you realize that everyone else is probably bored out of their minds to be looking at regular old water, and will probably hate you for taking up so much of their bandwidth with totally unhelpful pictures, so you throw the pot of water on the stove. Not literally. Just like this:

Only take a quick look, and then ignore it. Because a watched pot never boils, and it takes long enough for 3 gallons of water to come to a boil as it is. Even with a super-hot stove. Oh, and put a lid on it, too. It’ll take 60 million years longer without a lid.

Next, throw your butter in a pan and melt it:

Yes, you do have to throw it. I don’t go quite as far as the Barbarians and say that there are only two temperatures, off and high, but I do think it’s impossible to make lunch for a horde of hungry barbarians and gently and slowly place a stick of butter in the pan. Just chuck it in there.

Much to the horror of the barbarians, I actually have the heat on low, because while the butter is melting I grate the cheese.

And, to their further and continued horror, I grate it by hand instead of the food processor. It makes less dishes. And it’s quieter. And you know what? There’s usually enough ruckus going on without making some more of my own.

And, which would probably make them border on outrage, I get all artsy-fartsy with the camera instead of hurrying up and feeding them already!

Ok, all done tormenting people. Except maybe for those who are getting sick of cheese pictures. This is what 1 1/2 lbs. of cheese looks like after it’s been grated. By hand.

By now, your butter is probably thoroughly melted, and in great need of attendance. Dump in your flour:

Since the light shines from behind me, it casts everything on the stove into shadow, and makes it really hard to take pictures. A flash washes everything out. Maybe I should use a flashlight.

Stir it all together and let it get nice and bubbly. I let it cook for a minute or two after it’s all mixed together.

Here’s a closer-upper picture. If I remember correctly, I cheated and lightened it in a photo program.

Nextly, you need to add in the milk.

Traditionally, you’re usually told to pour in the milk slowly, stirring constantly. But actually, I have a higher likelihood of getting lumps that way. I just dump it all in at once. At first, you’ll freak out and think you have lumps:

But really, the coldness of the milk has just made the butter harden, and when it warms up, you’ll have a thick, lump-free white-sauce. My take on it is that the butter coats the flour—when the flour binds to flour in the beginning, you get lumps. If you add the milk slowly, you can “rinse” the butter off the flour, and the flour will bind to itself. If you dump it in all at once, the butter “freezes up” around the flour, and when it melts again, it releases the flour evenly into the milk. So no lumps. (I used the flash here. My kitchen isn’t really that dark, honest.)

Just keep stirring that sauce. If you’re a barbarian, you’ll have the heat as high as it can go. If you have a helper, you can do that. If you don’t you, probably want the heat on medium, and you’ll have to keep stirring it in between the following steps.

You need to put a strainer in your sink:

It better be a big one, because you’re going to pour 3 lbs. of cooked pasta into it.

Here I am playing Jackson Pollock:

Here I am enlargening to show texture, which, as everyone knows, is an crucial to telling people what your food is like.

You’re bored out of your mind, aren’t you? Don’t forget to stir the white sauce.

In the strictest sense, this next part isn’t part of making Macaroni and Cheese, but if you don’t do it, you stand in danger of being lynched by an angry mob. Or at least tarred and feathered.

You need to heat up some spicy tomatoes for people to ladle over their macaroni and cheese. You can use your favorite kind. We used to use “Mexican Stewed Tomatoes”, but that was discontinued. Now we use either tomatoes with jalapeños or green chiles, or a can of each.

Ta-da!

Let’s take a closer look:

And a closer look. . .this one’s kind of Pollock-y, too, isn’t it?

Enlargened to show texture. Ewww, gross!

Look, it’s boring making something I’ve had memorized since I was nine. And it’s boring taking pictures of such mundane things, and it’s boring getting all the pictures ready for the internet. I amuse myself where I can.

Dump your tomatoes in a pan, like so:

Some of us think the squishy tomatoes are a really gross texture, even if we like the flavor. So we scoop up the juice and leave the tomatoes behind. But then there isn’t enough juice to go around. So I rinse out the can with a little bit of water, which gives me the last bit of flavor in the can and more liquid in the pot.

Put that whole mess on the stove, too.

By now, your white sauce is probably getting all thick and bubbly.

Isn’t that a horrible picture? Almost not even worth posting.

Now add in your grated cheese:

Stir it in. . .

. . .keep stirring. . .

. . .and stirring. . .

. . .Okey-dokey, your cheese sauce is finished!

Probably at this point, the water is boiling furiously, like this:

So then you need to add in your three pounds of pasta, like this:

These are elbows, but you can actually use any shape you like. The Martlet and some others much prefer spaghetti, which I think is kind of gross. I like shells, but the Cross Moline thinks that’s gross, because it “holds too much of the cheesy sauce”. I don’t think that’s possible, myself.

Make sure you stir the pasta, or it will all stick together and fuse into a solid piece.

When the pasta stops feeling so hard and solid against your spoon, you have to start fishing pieces out to see if it’s done. When it is, it’ll look like this,

which isn’t very informative. You want the pasta to be totally non-crunchy, but not anywhere near squishy or soggy. Chewy is about what you’re going for, and it’s what some people refer to as al dente. (Which means “to the tooth” and makes no sense at all, unless you’re Italian.)

When it is done, dump it in your strainer, like so:

Then dump the pasta back into the empty pot,

and pour the cheese sauce over it.

Then stir

and stir

and you’re done.

By this point, your tomatoes should be hot, too.

So now you can call all your barbarians, and tell them the most wonderful meal of their lives is about to commence, so come eat. Don’t worry about being held to that claim, because all they will hear is “Food”.

Here’s what it looks like plain:

Here’s what it looks like with tomatoes and freshly ground pepper:

Here’s what it looks like enlarged to show texture:

Food. Can’t beat that.