Brownies with raspberries

This raspberry brownie recipe yields bars with a very chewy edge and a fudgy center (but not too fudgy). This one bowl brownies recipe post was sponsored by Cacao Barry.

Brownie texture

How do you like your brownies? Do you prefer fudgy brownies or chewy brownies? Do you like to eat the centre piece or an edge?

Trouble is there's no such thing as perfect. What I would call the perfect brownie might be your least favourite iteration. The fact is that I cannot come up with a brownie recipe that will please everyone because we all like different things.

This recipe makes brownies that I think are the perfect brownie: a brownie with thick and chewy edges that I hope you will love too. It's a variation on the recipe for brownies with walnuts.

How do you make brownies?

Ingredients

Most every brownie recipe you'll come across all have the same basic ingredients, but a few are key to achieving the desired texture:

• Butter or oil: I prefer to bake with butter, melting it with the chocolate. The water in the butter will help dissolve the sugars, which in turn contributes to a shiny crust on top. Butter also provides more flavour.
• Chocolate, preferably semi-sweet or bittersweet chocolate with at least 70 % cocoa solids. If you use chocolate chips, these have a lot of sugar and you will need to adjust this recipe
• Sugar (granulated and/or brown sugar): choose granulated sugar if you like to have that shiny paper thin flaky crust on top of brownies and use more sugar to make sure it forms
• Eggs: in brownies, you often see little to no leavening agents used and so the moisture from the eggs acts as a leavening agent here, but also helps dissolve the sugar to make a shiny top.
• Flour: the less flour you use, the more fudgy the brownies will be, but I find too little can lead to a brownie that is too dense and too greasy. I like to add enough flour to brownie batter so that it can absorb the fat and lead to a more chewy texture that's not so moist.
• Cocoa powder is there to give the brownies a deeper chocolate flavour that dark chocolate alone can't.
• Leavening agents: classic brownies don't have leavening agents, but like with cookies, you can add just a little baking powder so that the brownies rise taller yielding a slightly less dense, more open texture.
• Other flavour ingredients: you may see vanilla extract and even espresso powder to further enhance the flavour. Bitter coffee notes are known to enhance chocolate flavour.

Interestingly, though every brownie recipe is made with the same basic ingredients, there are a number of ways of combining them to make brownies.

Ways to mix brownie batter

1. The "creaming method": cream the butter with the sugar, then add the eggs, then add the dry ingredients, then finish with the melted chocolate. These brownies get a lot of lift from the creaming step, which incorporates air. These popcorn brittle brownies are a perfect example of brownies made by the creaming method.
2. The "whipped method": whip the eggs with the sugar, then add the dry ingredients, and finish with the chocolate which has been melted with the butter. Like with the creaming method, whipping the eggs with the sugar also provides a lot of lift to your brownie batter so they aren't overly dense. This simple gluten-free chocolate cake, though not technically a brownie, would fall into this whipped egg category.
3. The "one bowl brownies method": Melt the chocolate with the butter, then add all the other ingredients progressively after: sugar, then eggs, then dry ingredients. You may want to include a chemical leavener (baking powder) to give the brownies some lift. The recipe below is an example of this, and here's a gluten-free brownie made with peanut butter where everything is mixed in the pan you melt the butter and chocolate.

The good news is: any of these mixing methods lead to good brownies!

One bowl brownies

For this recipe, I wanted a one bowl brownie: an easy recipe for highly satisfying brownies that can be made in the same bowl that you use to melt the chocolate and butter.

If you weigh your ingredients, that means that you only dirty a bowl and a spoon (or whisk). Considering how messy some baking projects can get, that sounds pretty perfect to me!

After a few attempts and many, many brownies consumed, I ended up with this recipe, where some of the cocoa in a typical brownie recipe is replaced with dark chocolate. If you need help making baking substitutions, check out my guide for how to replace cocoa powder with dark chocolate (and vice versa).

The brownies are moist and still have a fudgy middle, but they aren't dense. The edges are delightfully thick and very chewy. I baked these brownies a good 40 minutes to ensure thick, chewy, dryer edges because that's how I like them. Feel free to bake them less.

I topped these brownies with fresh raspberries and pumpkin seeds, but you don't have to. You can fold some white chocolate into the batter if you like. I folded in some chopped walnuts.

Type of chocolate for brownies

When you make brownies with chocolate, ideally you should use the best chocolate for baking you can get, specifically a dark chocolate that has a deep, dark flavour and that isn't overly sweet.

To make these one bowl brownies, I used Ocoa chocolate from Cacao Barry, which is a 70% cocoa dark chocolate with a rich chocolate flavour. You can find it at IGA grocery stores in Quebec in 1 kilo resealable bags.

If you don't live in Quebec, you can order this chocolate online (and many other Cacao Barry products) via the Vanilla Food Company website. They ship across Canada and to the United States! This means that we all have access to professional quality chocolates at the click of a button. They also carry two types of Cacao Barry cocoa powders, which I highly recommend.

This post is sponsored by Cacao Barry. I was compensated monetarily and with product. Thanks for supporting the companies that allow me to create content for Kitchen Heals Soul. As always, please know that I wouldn’t work with a sponsor nor recommend a product if it wasn’t worth it.
Please note this post contains affiliate links to Amazon. If you buy a product I recommend, I will get a small commission, and the price you have to pay will not change in any way.