Do you like your chocolate brownies fudgy or cakey?
- Chocolate brownies are a cooked, sweet food that resembles something between a cookie and a cake, and are presented in the shape of a bar or a square.
- Chocolate brownies often have the texture of cake or fudge, and can have additional nuts, frosting or icing, cream, chocolate chips or the like.
- Chocolate brownies are generally made with flour, butter, eggs, cocoa powder or chocolate, and sugar.
- A chocolate brownie is often served by itself as a snack or dessert, with ice-cream, cream or icing sugar, often as snacks with tea, milk or coffee.
- It is believed that cake like chocolate brownies were first made by one of Chicago’s (USA) chefs from the The Palmer House Hotel, in the 1890s, for American Bertha Palmer, as a lunch box snack for ladies, originally containing walnuts and using apricot glaze.
- It is rumoured that chocolate brownies were made due to a mistake of either placing chocolate in a cookie batch, no flour in batter, or no baking powder in batter.
- Chocolate brownie recipes were first published in 1904, in two different American published cookbooks, with slight variations in the recipes, one of which was called ‘Bangor Brownies’.
- If the chocolate brownie ingredients are altered slightly by removing or substituting the chocolate with another ingredient, it is known as a ‘blondie’.
- Although the origin of the name is uncertain, ‘chocolate brownies’ may have come from the characters of the 1887 book ‘The Brownies: Their Book’ by Palmer Cox.
- Chocolate brownies quickly became popular, and have remained a common treat, and their popularity has spread to a number of other nations in the world.
Bibliography:
Chocolate Brownie, 2014, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chocolate_brownie
Martin C, Brownies: The History of a Classic American Dessert, 2012, History Scene, http://www.ushistoryscene.com/uncategorized/brownies/
