Notice a theme emerging this week? Busy times demand lots of one-bowl, one-pot recipes. Now, I'm sure you have a favorite brownie recipe that you've been turning to for years--maybe yours uses only cocoa powder, or maybe you favor a richer melted-chocolate-in-the-batter version or maybe you add chocolate chips or frost the tops or add walnuts or pecans and I'd like to have all your favorite recipes, truly, but going with the concept that you can never really have too much of a good thing, I humbly offer up this one-bowl version. It's fairly quick and easy with very little cleanup and yields some of  the fudgiest, chewy brownies I've ever had. And while we may not agree on many other things food (and non-food) related, the one thing I am confident that we can agree upon is that brownies are a good thing and we can never have too many recipes for them!!

And speaking of good things, I want to wish my middle guy a happy, happy birthday!! Boy, has the time flown! We miss you and love you so much!! These are probably even easy enough for you to make!!

One-Bowl Brownies

Makes about 2 dozen small brownies

Prep Time:  15 minutes; Bake Time:  25-30 minutes

Ingredients

• 1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter
• 3 ounces unsweetened chocolate
• 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, preferably Dutch-processed
• 2 1/2 cups sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
• 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
• 3 large eggs
• 1 1/2 cups unbleached, all-purpose flour

The Recipe

1.  Preheat oven to 350ºF and spray a 9x13-inch baking pan with nonstick cooking spray. Set aside.

2.  Into a large saucepan, place the butter and chocolate and melt them together, stirring until smooth, over low heat. Once melted, remove the pan from the heat and stir in the cocoa, sugar and salt. Then mix in the vanilla. Add the eggs in one at a time, beating well, but do it quickly because you don't want the heat of the mixture to cook the eggs at all. Stir in the flour, making sure you scrape the bottom of the pan well so that no traces of flour are left. 

3.  Pour the batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with a spatula. Bake for abut 25-30 minutes, until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean and the edges are just pulling away from the sides of the pan.

4.  Transfer the pan to a wire rack to cool completely. Then cut into squares and serve. Brownies last (ha!) at room temperature well wrapped for up to 3 days.

Enjoy!

Note:  Recipe adapted from The Mom 100 Cookbook by Katie Workman.