Brownies

Brownies today are bar cookies, usually chocolate, baked in square or rectangular cake pans. Although in the early twenty-first century some brownies seemed as rich and dense as fallen chocolate cakes, the original molassas brownie recipes by Fannie Farmer were based on her cookie recipes, and she initially baked them in fluted marguerite molds or “small, shallow, fancy cake tins” as individual cakes. The original brownies had no leavening, except for an egg or two, and little flour, but were so rich with butter and melted chocolate that they baked up softer than other cookies, a distinction that is sometimes lost among the many soft or underbaked cookies of the twenty-first century. There were initially several kinds of snacks called brownies, and the origin of even the chocolate brownies of today is still not entirely clear.