Hyslop - The Brownie Diaries: My Recipes for Happy Times, Heartbreak and Everything in Between

For my family, Mum and Dad and Sally and Boo. And in memory of Granny Sophie, who taught me how to bake.

You would be amazed by what you can give up, lose, or break, and yet still be a person who gets happy over brownies.

Augusten Burroughs

This is a great brownie and Im going to fight you for it.

Notting Hill

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First published in Great Britain 2022

Text Leah Hyslop, 2022

Photography Lauren Mclean, 2022

Leah Hyslop has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

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contents

whatever your problem in life, a brownie is the solution.

Brownies are irresistible. Densely and damply chocolatey, their fudgy interior barely holding together under a crinkly top, they exert a dark magic that is harder to say no to than a big-eyed puppy or free samples at the supermarket. I only have to glimpse a stack of brownies in a bakery window and I go as gooey as they are.

Like their key ingredient, chocolate, brownies have a near-miraculous ability to make us feel good. A single bite sends sugar and serotonin racing through the body, ready to patch up confidence or piece together a shattered heart. Brownies and their white chocolate cousins, blondies make bad days better, and good days even happier. A leaning tower of brownies will bring extra joy to any celebration (though also lots of chocolatey crumbs trodden into your carpet sorry in advance about that).

Just as there is a brownie for every occasion, there is a brownie for every taste. They can be elegantly simple, without so much as a walnut piercing their dark chocolatey hearts. At the other end of the scale, they can be flavoured with everything from beer to bananas, iced and sprinkled and drizzled and twizzled until theyre fancier than Marie Antoinette on a night out. A brownie is a blank canvas for the wildest indulgences of your imagination.

When it comes to texture, the world splits into two camps, Team Fudgy and Team Cakey, and each commands the kind of partisan fervour that civil wars are built on. Ive seen my most mild-mannered friends furiously spray brownie out of their mouths as they shout down the opposition. I personally prefer fudgy brownies that heavy, knock-a-man-out-at-twenty-paces texture is surely what makes them different to any other bake and most recipes in this book score fairly highly on the squidge-o-meter.

Im sure part of the reason brownies bring us such joy is how simple they are to make. Just a handful of basic ingredients and a stir of the wooden spoon reliably yields something delicious, something more than the sum of its parts. Yet the perfect brownie not underbaked, not overbaked takes a little skill and practice. The exhilaration when you get it right feels like youve just discovered penicillin but theres no moral obligation to share the results with the rest of the world.

That said, we probably make brownies as much for others as we do for ourselves. A brownie can say a lot of things, very easily and very unfussily. It can say I love you; I might be falling in love with you; Im sorry; Im thinking of you; lets be friends; are we still friends? Chocolate has always been linked to love and desire, and to share a brownie is an intimate thing not least because afterwards youre probably going to have to tell your companion they have chocolate all over their face.

There are people who, when looking back over their lives, can identify occasions and events by the clothes they wore, or the music they listened to. It sounds silly, but I can chart my life in brownies; from the crumbly squares I scoffed in the school canteen, to the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink blondies I inhaled with friends after a break-up. The ritual of baking brownies melting the chocolate, folding in the flour, scraping leftover batter from the bowl is as straightforward and soothing to me as popping on a favourite podcast or running a hot bath. Whatever else is going on in the world, a brownie always makes things better.

This book is a celebration of the brownie, in all its oozy, gooey, chewy forms. I hope, like any sensible person faced with a tray of homemade brownies, you get stuck straight in.