Best Fudgy Brownies
Gooey & chocolatey, with a crinkly top
The best fudgy brownies — rich, chocolatey, with a beautiful crinkly top and an irresistibly gooey, fudgy centre. Easy to make from scratch and perfect for chocolate lovers.
Ingredients
- 105 g dark chocolate
- 90 g all-purpose flour
- ½ tsp salt
- 113 g unsalted butter
- 53 g vegetable oil
- 100 g soft brown sugar
- 75 g unsweetened cocoa powder
- 1 tsp coffee powder
- 1 tsp vanilla extract
- 200 g white sugar
- 2 large eggs
Nutrition is an estimate per serving.
Method
- Preheat the oven to 160 °C / 320 °F fan-forced. Line an 8-inch square pan with baking paper.
- Chop the dark chocolate and combine it with the flour and salt.
- Melt the butter, oil, cocoa powder, brown sugar, coffee powder and vanilla together until smooth and hot.
- Beat the eggs and white sugar for about 3 minutes until pale and creamy. Gently fold in the chocolate mixture.
- Add the flour mixture and chopped chocolate; fold gently until just combined. Do not overmix.
- Pour into the pan and bake 22–25 minutes. For extra fudgy brownies, check at 22.
- Cool for about 1 hour, then cut into squares.
Watch it made
Notes on this recipe
Why the eggs get beaten for three minutes
That step looks skippable and is not. Beating the eggs and white sugar until pale and creamy dissolves the sugar and whips air into it, and that dissolved sugar is what forms the thin, shiny, crackled layer on top as the brownies bake. Skip it, or stop at thirty seconds, and you get a dull matte surface instead. The crinkly top is not a decoration, it is evidence the sugar went into solution.
A low oven is doing deliberate work
160 °C fan is cooler than most brownie recipes ask for, and the slower bake is the point. Brownies set from the outside in, so a hot oven firms the edges long before the centre has a chance to catch up, and you end up choosing between dry corners and raw middle. At 160 °C the whole tin moves towards set together, which is what lets you take them out while the centre is still soft.
Stop folding sooner than feels right
Once the flour goes in, every extra turn develops gluten, and gluten makes brownies cakey. Fold until the last streak of flour disappears and then put the spatula down. The chopped chocolate going in at the same time is deliberate too — it stays in pieces rather than melting into the batter, so you get seams of soft chocolate through the finished square.
They are not done when they look done
Pull them at 22 minutes for properly fudgy, 25 for firmer. A skewer should come out with moist crumbs clinging to it, not clean — clean means overbaked for brownies, even though it is exactly right for cake. The tin keeps cooking them for several minutes after it leaves the oven, and the full hour of cooling is what sets the texture. Cutting early gives you a smeared mess that would have been perfect twenty minutes later. If you are unsure which you are looking at, underbaked and fudgy look almost identical in the tin.
Keeping them
Airtight at room temperature for four days; they are better on day two once the texture evens out. Refrigerating firms them considerably, which some people prefer and which makes them easier to cut cleanly. They freeze well for three months, wrapped individually. The coffee powder, for the record, does not make them taste of coffee — it sharpens the cocoa, the same way a pinch of salt does.
