When I was young I didn’t know you could make cakes and brownies and other baked goods from scratch. You wanted something like that, you did what everyone does: you go to the market and buy a Duncan Hines or Betty Crocker mix (I think it was Duncan Hines for the brownies, Betty for the cakes) and a can of frosting and you made it at home.

Of course, now I know better. I’m not going to knock mixes, because they are still faster than from-scratch and you never know when you might need to throw something together, but at the moment I’m all about the from-scratch. And recently I discovered the most amazing thing.

I’ve been reading Baking By Julia recently and I kept alighting upon the “Best-Ever Brownies” page. I mean, there’s just something so attractive about a recipe that starts,

Those who are passionate about brownies argue in defense of their favorite type, cakey or fudgey. If you’re a cakey fan, go on to another recipe.

I’m talking Yeah, baby.

Since I was home all day with the kids yesterday, I decided this was the moment. I pulled the Kitchen Aid out of the closet (ugh—I gotta find a new place for that puppy), I lined up my blocks of Scharffen Berger Dark and Scharffen Berger Unsweetened, and I got to work.

Sophia’s contribution was to stir the egg mixture into the hot chocolate mixture (a very important part, because if you don’t stir fast enough, you get chocolate-flavored scrambled eggs) and to request that I chop off a piece or two of the gigantic block of chocolate for her own personal tasting. I gave her the shards of what remained from chopping up the chocolate. “This is baking chocolate, sweetie, not eating chocolate.” She gave me this look as if to say, Like there’s a difference.

I cooked them for longer than the recipe suggests, because they were just so gooey the first two times I took them out. They were still pretty gooey though, even after cooling. Gooey, fudgey, and, oh yes, really good.

No joke: Best Ever Brownies

1 1/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon salt
2 sticks (8 oz.) unsalted butter
4 oz unsweetened chocolate, coarsely chopped

2 oz bittersweet chocolate, coarsely chopped
2 cups sugar, divided (divided isn’t in the original recipe, but just divide, okay?)
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
4 large eggs

Center a rack in the oven and preheat the oven to 350F.

Sift the flour and salt together and set aside.

Melt the butter and chocolate together in a medium saucepan over low heat, stirring frequently and keeping a watchful eye on the pot to make certain the chocolate doesn’t scorch. (Alternatively, you can melt the ingredients in the top of a double boiler over, not touching, simmering water.) Add 1 cup of the sugar to the mixture and stir for half a minute, then remove the pan from the heat and stir in the vanilla. Pour the mixture into a large bowl.

Put the remaining 1 cup sugar and the eggs into the bowl of a mixer (or a mixing bowl if you’re using a hand-held mixer) and whisk by hand just to combine. Little by little, pour half of the sugar and eggs into the chocolate mixture, stirring gently but constantly with a rubber spatula so that the eggs don’t set from the heat. Fit the whisk attachment to the mixer and whip the remaining sugar and eggs until they are thick, pale, and doubled in volume, about 3 minutes. Using the rubber spatula, delicately fold the whipped eggs into the chocolate mixture. When the eggs are almost completely incorporated, gently fold in the dry ingredients.

Baking the Brownies

Pour and scrap the batter into an unbuttered 9-inch square pan—a heavy ceramic or glass pan is ideal. Bake the brownies for 25 to 28 minutes, during which time they will rise a little and the top will turn dark and dry. Cut into the center at about the 23-minute mark to see how the brownies are progressing: They’ll be perfect if they’re just barely set, and still pretty gooey. They’re still awfully good on the other side of set, so don’t worry if you miss the moment on your first try. Cool the brownies in the pan on a rack. Cut into 1 1/2-by-3 inch bars to serve.

Storing

The brownies will keep, covered, for 2 to 3 days at room temperature and can be frozen for up to a month. Thaw, still wrapped, at room temperature. These never freeze solid, so you might want to think about using them as a mix-in for ice cream

Contributing Baker Rick Katz

It’s funny what I realized as I typed this recipe in. I did two things “wrong”: I used 4 oz of bittersweet and 2 oz of unsweetened instead of the other way around, and one of the first things I said to Darin as we tested the creation last night was, “Does this taste a tad too sweet to you?” (He disagreed, saying they were perfect as is. For whatever that’s worth, if you’re keeping score of Darin’s and my takes on things.) And I greased the glass dish instead of not greasing it, which might have affected the cooking some (though I don’t understand how).

Anyhow. If you need brownies, go for it. Really good. And even better the next day, I think. I doubt they’ll be around for much of Day 3, which is a Saturday and all 4 of us will be here.

My sister has always hosted Christmas because a)I was living in LA and since the rest of the family lived in SF, it seemed better for me to go there rather than require them to all come to me and b)my parents lived in SF and it was easier to get them to ma sœur than to me.

This year, though, it dawned on me that we could have it at my house: they would only have to transport my Mom (and, of course, the acres of presents). “Hey, do you want to have Christmas at my house?”

She said, no, it was fine to have it at hers. Then she stopped and said, “But next year we can have it at yours.”

Hum. A year away. Just enough time to practice.

See, every year my sister puts on a pretty good spread: prime rib, potatoes, vegetables, rolls. Evidently Andronico’s in the City has a nice Buy Your Christmas Meal dinner package. It’s very tasty.

I, however, am getting so crazed obsessed interested in cooking that I want to do my own. Since I have never cooked a piece of beef on my own before (save making meatballs for spaghetti, which isn’t exactly the same thing), I decided I need to practice at least three times before the big day.

Yesterday I said to Darin, “Hey, I invited Mitch over to dinner tonight. How about prime rib?”

Darin: “‘Kay.”

The menu I decided on:

1. prime rib
2. Yorkshire pudding (mais oui!)
3. a kale-and-polenta pie (why? because the CSA had delivered kale on Friday and I was like, What the f is kale?, followed by, I’d better f’ing cook this stuff)
4. chocolate souffles

Yes, I decided to go whole hog and cook four things I had never cooked before.

Needless to say, by the end of the night I was certifiable. (Also, I have no pictures.) Going completely nuts taught me a few things, however.

Thing #1: Prime rib is f’ing expensive.

Not that I don’t love Mitch a lot but…I nearly plotzed when I saw how much the 5-lb. roast I picked up was. And I would need 8 or more pounds for next Christmas, depending on the number of guests. Holy Jehosophat. Not that Lawry’s and other beef places aren’t raking it in hand over fist with the prices they charge, but I think we got 7 or 8 pieces out of that roast and each one cost about $8 bucks, without the oven charges or cook salary. Whoa.

I was determined to get the prime rib right. For whatever reason, though, I decided to go with the recipe from How to Cook Everything instead of Barbara Kafka’s Roasting. (The recipe from The Best Recipe, which involves cooking the meat over a Bic lighter for 8 to 10 hours, was Right Out.)

Now, I will ruin the suspense: the prime rib turned out magnificently: perfectly medium rare, juicy, flavorful. We had to check it with the instant meat thermometer about 5 times before we hit the right temperature though—the instant-read meat thermometer is your friend and knows better than you or the recipe does—and I was completely off on how long it was going to take to cook. But I have a feeling I would have been more in charge of the situation with Barbara Kafka’s book. I must consult her book in depth the next time I will be doing a large meat roast.

Thing #2: Take the meat out before you’re ready to cook it.

“Oops, there’s a step I forgot,” I said.

“How bad is it?” Darin asked.

“I forgot to take the meat out. Dinner’s going to be an hour later than I thought.”

Which is, you know, deadly when you have kids. You can’t just give them hors d’œuvres—that becomes their dinner.

The meat stayed ridiculously cold after a long time in the oven. I think we sat down at the table at 7:30 when I’d planned for dinner at about 6. Urg.

Thing #3: Learn the difference between soft peaks and stiff peaks when whipping egg whites.

I decided to make the chocolate souffle recipe out of The Complete Cooking Light Cookbook. One of the steps is to whip the mixture of 6 egg whites, cream of tartar, and sugar into “stiff peaks.”

“Darin, what are stiff peaks?”

“Well, you know what soft peaks are, right?” Pause. “Okay, I begin to see the problem you’re having.”

Yeah, I decided to make a souffle without knowing what “soft peaks” or “stiff peaks” or “overbeating” is. I ended up with a tremendous amount of souffle mix, which completely filled the eight ramekins. When we cooked all eight (why did I cook eight when only five people were eating? Volume), all eight rose alarmingly high in the oven; the four on the bottom shelf fought the rack, and the rack won.

I was not won over by the souffle I made. It was way too light and airy and had the barest chocolate taste, even though I’d used 71% Valrhona and Scharffen-Berger unsweetened cocoa for the chocolate.

Then I saw the souffles Dexygus made and I was like, Damn. Those are the souffles I wanted.

Of course, I have to learn about whipping egg whites first.

And I’ll probably make this chocolate cake before I return to souffles, unless I find something to do with leftover egg yolks, in a hurry.

Thing #4: Learn the difference between instant polenta and premade polenta, if there is one.

Pam Anderson (no, not that one), in How To Cook Without a Book, mentions that you should always have instant polenta on hand to whip up some polenta on a weeknight dinner. When making polenta from her book I couldn’t find anything marked “instant polenta” at the store, so I bought some polenta from the bulk bins and cooked it and it turned out just fine.

Gotta remember that whole “turned out just fine” thing in the future.

This time, when preparing for the kale-and-polenta pie (from Vegetables Every Day by Jack Bishop), I asked after instant polenta at Whole Foods and they showed me these plastic sausages full of polenta. Aha! I took my prized rounds of polenta home, cooked the kale, and folded in the cup full of premade polenta.

Which just sat there.

I mushed and stirred and tried to mix and it just sat there.

“You need dry polenta,” Darin said. “What you’ve got isn’t going to absorb any liquid.”

“He says instant!”

Darin read the package. “This isn’t instant, this is premade.”

“I’m pretty sure premade is instant.”

“You need dry,” he said.

I had a teeny tiny bit of the dry polenta I’d made last time still in the cupboard. I threw it in on top of the kale and premade polenta and sure enough: slurp! it drank up the liquid.

I baked the resulting mess for however long the recipe called for and then some. I took it out and let it cool (as the recipe says to do), and when it came time to eat the result was…okay. Good enough for dinner, not good enough to save. Which is why I’m not sharing the recipe; I’m only sharing recipes of things I think I made well.

Anybody knows about the instant-premade axis, I’d appreciate a note.

Thing #5: Stop telling everyone you’ve done everything wrong. Let them figure it out.

Darin actually gave me that feedback during dinner last night. “Everything turned out fine, but you’ve been driving yourself nuts all evening!”

Mitch added: “If you’re not sure it’s great, serve it and find out what your guests think. If you’re sure it’s terrible, throw it away and never let them know. And I would like some more of the kale-and-polenta pie, please.” (Mitch is like Darin: while he is wildly supportive and would eat some of everything to be polite, he wouldn’t take seconds if he didn’t want to. So I was encouraged on that front.)

So, I’m going to work on pretense-of-confidence this year. At least on the, y’know, cooking front.

I went nuts last night: made spaghetti and meatballs (man, the meatball recipe from How To Cook Everything rocks mightily) with homemade spaghetti sauce (which the kids don’t eat, natch).

Then I went nuts and made candied orange peel. That didn’t turn out so well. Possibly I used the wrong kind of orange peel or didn’t scrap enough of the pith off. (Tried to get it all, didn’t always succeed.) But the result had a terrible orange taste. Tossed the whole thing. Will try again another time.

Then, denied candied orange peel, I made Stephanie Zonis’s recipe for hot chocolate. Oh baby. Oh yes, here it is, come to Mama. Nice, thick extremely chocolatey. I used a bar of Valrhona and half a bar of Green and Black’s Maya Gold (slightly orangey/spicey chocolate). Now, the recipe says it makes 2-3; don’t you believe it. This makes 4 easy, and I say this as someone who really, really likes chocolate. This isn’t so much “hot chocolate” as it is “drinkable pudding,” so be forewarned.

I didn’t use the food processor—I whipped out my chef’s knife and chopped the chocolate up. Seemed to work fine. I also didn’t use any sugar, because I like a darker, less sweet chocolate. I did add the vanilla though.

I took roughly half of this last night, pouring the other half into another cup (which I cooled down in a water bath, than stuck in the fridge with plastic wrap right against the surface of the chocolate, to avoid getting a skin). Half of this recipe was way too much; I would have been much better off taking a third or a fourth. Or, as I say to Darin at moments like this, “Get the syringe of adrenaline ready!”