My brownie recipe is from a cookbook and I tried a lot of variations on it and then had to concede that the person who wrote the recipe got it just right. I make it with high quality chocolate and butter and then am very careful not to over bake it and they turn out deliciously decadent every time!
For those moments you just can't wait for them to cool, although, even cooled a good moist brownie tends to stick to the knife.
Your welcome.
Part of this phenomena comes from 20th century cooking (especially for sweets): the ingredients are mass produced to high standards of consistency, and hence there may be one just right recipe (especially if you're backing in a climate controlled kitchen at sea level). Consider, instead, artisanal bread baking in 2018. Your flour comes from a food coop which used to get it stone ground by an Amish cooperative, but now switched suppliers to a local farmer -- and the recipe needs to change. Your sourdough starter turned acidic because you went away on vacation and it sat in the fridge -- change the recipe again! It's an unusually damp and chilly day, and the loaf is sitting out during its second rise -- you'll need to change the recipe!
Of course this is part of the thrill of this sort of baking -- that you have to understand the underlying processes, not just the well-made building blocks, to end up with good results. Sort of like switching from running OS X or Windows to, say, Linux from Scratch...
First, there was a money-saving switch from lard to commercial shortening or margarine. Either one was made of partially hydrogenated vegetable oil.
Second, due to trans fats or a desire to be less fake, that got switched to butter.
Lard makes wonderful brownies. Compared to butter, the taste comes out far cleaner. The purity of the chocolate really comes through.
Another fine option is coconut oil.
One bonus of the Edmonds recipe is it also uses only ingredients you probably already have (except maybe the desiccated coconut).
3¾c. of brownie mix (again, Betty Crocker Original Supreme)
2 eggs
¼c. water
⅓c. vegetable oil
and the included packet of Hershey's syrup
As of the original redesign mentioned in the story, the amount of brownie mix in a box was cut back to 3 cups, the recipe involved 1 egg instead of 2, and I don't remember how the water and oil were affected but they were different.
Is the quantity now the only difference?
So, if we do the 1.25 thing and follow the instructions, they'll be perfect?
so I just use it and people love it, but I literally can't tell them or they'd think I'm serving them rubbish
So what are the right amounts if you please?
PS. I've heard of people adding an egg to a box of cake mix when it isn't required.
Sales were poor, and market research and perhaps focus groups determined that people felt slightly guilty that they weren't doing enough work in creating a cake - so the company went back, removed the egg components from the mix, changed the instructions, and sales rebounded.
For a long time, decades at this point, my mom has been known for the brownies she brings to events (and, by extension, that my sister and I bring to events). People would rave about them and demand the secret, which my mom, my sister, and I would all freely give out: it's from a box, Betty Crocker, make sure you get the "Supreme" kind and don't overbake it. That's it.
But. But! A while ago, maybe 3-4 years at this point, my mom noticed that the brownie box had changed. She had a stockpile (being known for the brownies, you see) but tried the new box before exhausting the stockpile. And it was not the same. The new recipe had different amounts of every ingredient and it just did not come out right. At all. She called the company to complain and actually managed to escalate the call far enough to get someone to admit a dark truth: the recipe on their end for the mix hadn't changed, but for various reasons to do with what they wanted to put on the "Nutrition Facts", they had changed the instructions of how to prepare them and the amount of the mix that was in each box.
My mom, not leaving this to chance, did a little bit of kitchen science and verified that what came out of the old box (from the stockpile, following the recipe) was either identical or a very close match to what came out of the new box (but following the old recipe), albeit a little inconvenient as you now needed roughly 1.25 boxes' worth of mix to make one batch of brownies. But this was but a minor hurdle for the truly devoted; and it meant that we now had, wait for it, a bona fide secret family recipe. The easiest one ever, since it still involved just making brownies from a box. (And keeping a jar of "remainder brownie mix" for use in the next batch.)
The epilogue to the story is that although the good recipe had been stable for a really long time, we were evidently not the only ones to notice a problem with the new one, because the box recipe has changed on several occasions since then—each time, as far as we can tell, without changing the blend in the underlying mix (because if we follow our Secret Recipe it still turns out fine). Really, I'm just waiting for them to throw up their hands, give up, and return to the original recipe, which would sort of deprive my family of a good story, but everybody would get better brownies so it's a win overall. :)