A chocolate brownie, or simply a brownie, is a chocolate baked dessert bar. Brownies come in a variety of forms and may be either fudgy or cakey, depending on their density. Brownies often have a glossy "skin" on their upper crust and may include ingredients such as nuts, frosting, or chocolate chips. A variation containing brown sugar and vanilla rather than chocolate in the batter is called a blond brownie or blondie. The brownie was developed in the United States at the end of the 19th century and popularized in the country during the first half of the 20th century.
Brownies are typically eaten by hand or with utensils, and may be accompanied by a glass of milk, served warm with ice cream (), topped with whipped cream, or sprinkled with powdered sugar. In North America, they are common homemade treats and they are also popular in restaurants, ice cream parlors, and coffeehouses. The same popularity in cafes is seen in Sweden.
In the Southern United States, brownies prepared from cake mix are a rare homemade dessert eaten on weekdays.
During the 1880s in the United States, dinner parties themed around the color brown were popular events. Following the standard set in lifestyle magazines, hosts served brown dishesâÂÂbread, soup, turkeyâÂÂincluding sautéed mushrooms, which were then known colloquially as "brownies". By the following decade, the event had evolved into a feast of sweets under the name "Brownie Banquets", parties decorated with figurines of illustrator Palmer Cox's comic characters The Brownies. Chocolate ice cream, graham crackers, and brownies were common elements with "brownie" now used to refer to a molasses cake. One such recipe appeared in the 1896 version of Fannie Farmer's The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, containing molasses and a nut at their center, but no chocolate. In 1899, a recipe for an unleavened chocolate cake was published in a Chicago cookbook under the name "Brownie cake". Food writer Stella Parks identifies this as a "proto-brownie", the earliest she could find evidence of. Through 1904, a recipe for a brownie with modern ingredient ratios were published in newspapers in Chicago and the Northeastern United States regions; Parks infers from the broad area and quick succession these recipes appeared that they were drawing on a common source.
In the 1906 version of her cookbook, Farmer modified her recipe to include chocolate. Sources differ on how this came about; biochemist Shirley Corriher proposed in 2008 that these could have been created by Farmer reducing the flour in her 1896 chocolate cookie recipe, while Parks suggests Farmer may have been influenced by a 1905 visit to the Laconia Woman's Club, who had published a recipe for chocolate brownies in a 1904 cookbook. This edition of The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book was read widely, and for the first time the entire US was introduced to the brownie, with newspapers and cookbooks printing their own recipes over the following years. Recipes for brownies at this time required sugar and butter be creamed, giving these early brownies a cakey rather than fudgy texture.
Farmer trained Maria Willett Howard who ultimately created Lowney's Brownies for Walter M. Lowney Co. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America reported that her recipe was often used in New England before 1912.
By 1907, the brownie was well established in a recognizable form, appearing in Lowney's Cook Book by Maria Willet Howard (published by Walter M. Lowney Company, Boston) as an adaptation of the Boston Cooking School recipe for a "Bangor Brownie". It added an extra egg and an additional square of chocolate, creating a richer, fudgier dessert. The name "Bangor Brownie" appears to have been derived from the town of Bangor, Maine, which an apocryphal story states was the hometown of a housewife who created the original brownie recipe. Maine food educator and columnist Mildred Brown Schrumpf was the main proponent of the theory that brownies were invented in Bangor. While The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink (2007) refuted Schrumpf's premise that "Bangor housewives" had created the brownie, citing the publication of a brownie recipe in a 1905 Fannie Farmer cookbook, in its second edition, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America (2013) said it had discovered evidence to support Schrumpf's claim, in the form of several 1904 cookbooks that included a recipe for "Bangor Brownies".
One legend about the creation of brownies is that of Bertha Palmer, a prominent Chicago socialite whose husband owned the Palmer House Hotel. In 1893, Palmer asked a pastry chef for a dessert suitable for ladies attending the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition. She requested a dessert that would be smaller than a piece of cake, and easily eaten from boxed lunches. The result was the Palmer House Brownie, made of chocolate with walnuts and an apricot glaze. The Palmer House Hotel still serves this dessert to patrons made from the same recipe. The name was given to the dessert some time after 1893, but was not used by cookbooks or journals at the time.
During the 1960s, brownies were introduced to TV dinners.
Early recipes, such as Lowney's Brownies, included chocolate, butter, eggs, salt, sugar, vanilla, flour, and chopped nuts, while modern recipes also include brown sugar. The 1976 edition of Lizzie Black Kander's The Settlement Cook Book also includes cocoa powder as a replacement for chocolate, baking powder, and walnuts. The book states that butter and chocolate should be melted together, while beaten eggs and sugar should be added to a separate mixture. The two should then be combined and beaten again, after which the remaining ingredients should be added. Corriher wrote that brownies can sometimes also include dried cherries and coffee beans.
<big>The Health Risks of Brownies</big>
Brownies are very sweet and many people enjoy eating them wherever they feel like it. They taste good and are soft and moist, which makes them popular and a likable sweet dessert for people as well. But brownies are not very healthy because they have a lot of sugar and fat. Eating too many brownies or too much sugar can cause health problems. Too much sugar can make people gain weight. It can also increase the chance of becoming overweight or obese. Eating too much sugar for a long time can lead to serious problems like type 2 diabetes. Because brownies are sweet and sugary, it is important to eat them only sometimes and not every day, so it's better to not always crave for it and to have a healthy body as well.ÃÂ Studies show that foods with a lot of sugar, like brownies, can affect health if people eat too much of the brownies because of the unhealthy ingredients that the brownies contain such as butter, flour, sugar. Eating brownies once in a while is a good choice and is a great way to stay healthy for the future as well.
Healthy Brownies with Beans
In order to make brownies healthier it can be madeàby using beans. The beans are first put in water to soak. Soaking makes the beans softer, and it removes away the strong taste. After soaking, the beans are dried and ground into flour. This flour is then mixed with normal flour to make brownies. Using some bean flour does not make the brownies taste bad. Chocolate is added to make the brownies sweet and to add the flavor of the chocolate . Beans are good for the body because they have protein and fiber that every single human being needs. Protein helps build muscles and fiber is good for the stomach. People can still love the brownies even when some bean flour is used in the correct process and method. This is a good way to make brownies a little healthier without ruining the taste. People that really love brownies can still enjoy brownies andàcan eat brownies with beans sometimes and get some healthy things from them. Which is hard to get the health benefits from the other types of brownies due to its unhealthy ingredients.àEven with the bean flour, consumers find it delicious and tasty as the original brownies. In the scientific study by Elena MartÃÂnez, José Emilio Pardo, and colleagues, they tested replacing butter with nut oils in brownies.àThe researchers changed some brownies by using half nut oils from almonds, pistachios, or walnuts. When they used nut oils, the brownies were softer and it tasted delicious, especially the ones with walnut oil. People who tasted the brownies liked the ones with nut oils more than the normal butter ones, even the consumer vitamin E went up and gave them great health benefits which they prefer the brownies with the nuts oil instead of butter which was very unhealthy.