Espresso Brownies

Fudgy 8x8 cocoa brownies with a shot of strong coffee stirred into the melted butter.

dessert
baking
chocolate

Read left to right: ingredients enter on the left, each block spans what it consumes. Open in the playground

Recipe source

Butter and flour an 8x8 in pan
Preheat oven to 350*flour
UBR: 4oz (115 g) unsalted butter
melt UBR
SG: 1 cup (200g g) sugar
V: 1/4 tsp vanilla extract
COFFEE: 1 shot espresso very very strong coffee
MIX1: mix UBR SG V COFFEE
EGG: 2 large eggs
MIX2: mix MIX1 EGG
FLW: 1/2 cup all purpose flour
COCOA: 1/3 cup (80g) cocoa powder
BSO: 1/4 tsp baking soda
SALT: 1/4 tsp table salt
FOLD: fold in MIX2 FLW COCOA BSO SALT
bake 350* 30-40 minutes FOLD

Notes

The espresso does not read as coffee in the finished brownie. It sharpens the cocoa, which is doing all of the chocolate work here — there is no melted chocolate in the batter at all.

Two things decide the texture:

Butter temperature. Let the melted butter cool enough that it will not cook the eggs when they go in, but not so far that it starts to set.
When you pull them. 30 minutes leaves a fudgy center; 40 minutes gives a cakier crumb that slices more cleanly.

Fold the dry ingredients in only until the last streaks of flour disappear. Everything past that point trades chew for cake.

Reading the diagram

The two instructions at the top span the full width because they depend on nothing — pan and oven can be handled whenever. From there the map converges: butter, sugar, vanilla and coffee become MIX1, the eggs join at MIX2, and the dry ingredients meet the batter at FOLD, which the bake consumes.