I’ve been making brownies for a long time and that’s because I love brownies. I love making them, eating them, and sharing them.

Recently I’ve been making them in a brownie bar pan, results in about 10 to 12 individual brownies at a time, all of them with four edges. In my family, we prefer fudge-y brownies to cake-y brownies, and all of us love the edges, so this pan delivers on that. I got my pan in a local secondhand store, but you can get one online and sometimes at Walmart or Target.

One of my favorite basic recipes involves off-the-shelf Baker’s unsweetened chocolate, butter, sugar, eggs, vanilla, flour, and, if you want to get fancy, nuts or chocolate chips. It used to be, that the old Baker’s package–which was superior to the present package in a variety of way–had this basic recipe on the back of every package. So, if I was in the grocery store and had a sudden urge to go home and bake brownies, I could just grab the package, make sure I had all the ingredients, and head home.

But now my local stores sometimes stock a version of Baker’s chocolate that has a fancied-up version of the brownies on the package, with peanut butter and other ingredients mixed in. That’s fine, those brownies look pretty good. But if you want the basic recipe, here it is so you can clip it and keep it handy.

If you want to go next level on brownies, make Ina Garten’s Outrageous Brownies. The recipe is available on Food Network and in her Barefoot Contessa cookbook. These beauties require more than one bowl, I usually need three, and their particular superpower is the addition of instant coffee granules, in addition to heaps of nuts and chocolate chips. Just so you know, these do require more effort, you’ll have to use more than one bowl, sometimes I use up to three, but if you try these it will be hard to go back to any other. Consider yourself warned.

I recently read of a trending tip on TikTok, and that is this: when baking brownies from a mix, instead of using water–many recipes call for two or so tablespoons of water up to a quarter cup–substitute in freshly brewed and cooled black coffee, strong black coffee. When I’m short on time I sometimes make brownies from King Arthur brownie mix, and next time I am going to give that a try. I’ve been known to eat brownies for lunch or dinner, sometimes lunch and dinner, and I figure if I add in coffee, that qualifies brownies as good for breakfast too.

Baker’s One Bowl Brownies

4 ounces unsweetened chocolate in bar form

3/4 cup butter

2 cups sugar

3 eggs

1 tsp. vanilla

1 cup flour

1 cup coarsely chopped pecans, walnuts, or chocolate chips, or a mix

Preheat oven to 350°F.

Prepare a 13 by 9 inch pan with butter or cooking oil.

Microwave chocolate and butter in large microwaveable bowl on high for about two minutes, or until the butter is just melted. Stir until it is completely melted, and then stir in sugar. When those ingredients are fully incorporated, and the mixture is cooled off, blend in sugar and vanilla. To that, add the flour and any other mix in. Mix together. Pour into pan

Bake about 30 to 35 minutes until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with fudge-y crumbs. Do not overbake!

Cool and carefully remove from pan.

Note: If you are using a brownie bar pan, follow manufacturer’s instructions. For my pan, I reduce the temperature to 300 degrees, and start checking for doneness at around the 20 minute mark. To get them out in one piece, I usually run a knife around all of the edges of each one, and then immediately and carefully turn the entire pan over onto a cooling rack covered with parchment.