Gemma's Best-Ever Brownies

Hi Bold Bakers! In the past I have done videos that I call best ever. Like my best ever chocolate cake and my best ever cinnamon rolls. Now I call these best ever because they are the best recipes that I have come across over my career as a pastry chef. Today I'm going to share with you my best ever recipe for the fudgiest, most chocolaty brownies. So let's get baking. So first off I've got some good news. Now if you're like me, you've got a hectic lifestyle, you're always on the go, and you have go-to snacks, well my favorite snacks come from NatureBox.com. Now what I love about them is that you know they're made with good quality ingredients, you can taste it, and they don't contain any artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners. Which means that they taste great and they're better for you. Now just a few of my favorite snacks are garlic pistachios, which have a lovely sweet and savory flavor, dark cocoa nom noms, which are really decadent and full of cocoa, and then I really really love these guys, Asiago and Cheddar Cheese Crisps. Now I usually take a bag of those when I go flying on a plane and they're a great snack. Now these are just a few, they have over 100 snacks on their website and they add new ones every month so you have loads to choose from. Now here's the great part, NatureBox have partnered with me to bring my Bold Bakers three free snacks with their first order, it's incredible. So you want to go to NatureBox.com forward slash Gemma and they will deliver your snacks straight to your door, and if by any chance you don't like a snack, they will replace it for free. So now all of this information and the link of where you can get your snacks can be found in the description box below this video, and unfortunately for right now it is only available to the United States and Canada. Okay, that's snacks out of the way, let's talk brownies. So now our first ingredient into the bowl is melted butter. Now I get a lot of questions about the butter I use, do I use salted or unsalted, and I always use salted because it gives that little bit of extra flavor to all of your baking. But it's honestly up to you what you want to do. So our next ingredient is brown sugar, now I love to bake with brown sugar because it gives your baking a lovely caramel-rich flavor. If you don't have brown sugar you can always use white, and also I have a video of how you can make your own brown sugar on BiggerBolderBaking.com along with the recipe for these brownies. Then I'm gonna follow that with some white sugar. So here I have some flavorless oil, and by flavorless oil I mean any type of oil except for something very strong like olive oil. Now what this does to your brownies, it makes them really moist and fudgy so you don't want to miss out on this, it's like our secret ingredient. Then I'm gonna take my whisk and just whisk it all together for around 2 minutes. So now I know to call something best ever you really have to stand by what you say, but I know that you're going to love these. Now you know when you get a brownie and there's a little bit of fudgy stuff in the middle? Well these brownies are all fudge. There's no cake, they are all rich, gooey, fudgy, yumminess. So I know you're gonna freak out when you see them. Okay that's all mixed up, now we're gonna add in our other ingredients. So now into here we're gonna add in some vanilla extract. Now you know I love baking with vanilla extract, if you don't have it you can leave it out, but I recommend adding it in because it just adds such lovely flavor. Next we're gonna add in some salt, because you know I always say baking needs salt. So a little bit of salt in there brings out all the flavors of the cocoa and the chocolate, yummy. So our next ingredient are eggs. Now I don't want you to worry, if you don't eat eggs, you can still make these brownies. You can replace eggs with applesauce, mashed banana, I have lots of options on my website so make sure you check out the recipe. Then just crack all your eggs in there, and then just whisk them in until they're well combined. So this is the kind of recipe I love because you mix it all by hand, you don't need a machine at all. Okay lovely, everything is combined. Now we're gonna add in our last few ingredients. I'm gonna place a sieve over my mixing bowl. Then into this I'm going to add in some flour. Now you can use gluten-free flour if it's all-purpose, or you can even use a whole wheat flour because sometimes I get questions about that too. Okay now here is the star of the show, rich, dark cocoa powder. Now when it comes to cocoa powder, don't buy sweetened cocoa powder, you don't want any sugar in there, you want pure, dark, rich, yummy, bitter cocoa powder. So buy as best quality as you can. And just in case you're thinking of using hot chocolate powder instead of cocoa powder, don't do it. I used to do that when I was young and it's not the same thing. Okay great, everything is in there, now just sift in your dry ingredients. So now you don't often see me sifting ingredients, but when it comes to cocoa powder I always sift cocoa powder because it can end up having lumps in it and you want to make sure they work themselves out before they go into your mix. Okay lovely, everything is in there, this is looking great. I've got my spatula now and I'm going to fold these ingredients together. Now I have said this to you many a time and I'm gonna keep on saying it, when it comes to adding in flour, you don't want to beat in flour, you want to gently fold it into your mix, be it a cupcake, cake, whatever it is. If you overmix flour it can actually make your bake good kind of tough, so just very gently mix it in until it's all combined and then stop. Oh this looks like chocolate lava goodness. So now our next ingredient are big chunks of dark, bittersweet chocolate, so in you go. Now I like to chop up my own chocolate so I get big bits and small bits all the way throughout my brownie. But I always recommend, use something that's a little bit darker, like 72% cocoa solid so you get a really nice balance of bitter and sweet, okay? And then just gently fold those guys in, oh man. This is hardcore brownie. And that's it. Lovely. It's ready for our tin. So here I have my tin, lined and ready to go, now this is 7 inches by 11 inches. Now if you have a little bit of a bigger tin you can use that, don't worry about it, just wanna make sure that you don't overcook your brownies so they might take less time. And then we're just gonna go ahead and pour in all of this lovely, gooey, yummy batter. Look at that, it's funny how I just know by a batter that this is going to be awesome. Now all you want to do is take your spatula and just kind of spread it out into the corners of your tin, make it nice and level. Gorgeous. If you haven't noticed already, these also make really thick brownies. So they're definitely big and bold, for sure. Okay, this is looking fantastic. Mmm, tastes yummy. It's ready to be baked off. Bake your brownies off at 350°F or 180°C for 35-40 minutes. Now when it comes to these brownies, the key is not to overbake them, you want to have them still nice and squishy in the middle, so don't go longer than 40 minutes. I am so happy with how these turned out, and they smell amazing. So now I let these rest for around 2 hours, just so they can kind of relax and settle into themselves. Now I'm going to take them out of the tin. You know when your brownies are perfectly cooked? When they're a little bit firmer around the outside, but they're still soft to the touch in the middle. And then I'm going to cut into them so you can see all of our hard work pay off. Now I'm cutting these brownies only into 8, but you can actually cut them up to 16 pieces because they're really rich and thick, so everybody is going to have enough. Just look at that. Now the little bit of a scary thing about this is, and a little bit exciting, I have no idea what it looks like on the inside until you lift it up and show it. So I'm really hoping all of my hype and building up to this is going to pay off, so let's have a look. Yeah! Yep, that's it. Absolutely insane. Look at that, really fudgy, moist, it's almost black on the inside, that's how soft it is. And then big chunks of chocolate dotted all the way throughout, like seriously, best ever brownie. Of course now I'm going to have to try some because that's my job. You see, this is the kind of dessert that I am all about. It is rich, it is dark, it's sweet, there's a little bit of bitterness to it, and it is so unbelievably moist. I stand by what I said, best ever brownie recipe. I really hope you make this recipe and love it as much as I do, and let me know in the comments below what other best ever recipes you'd like to see me do. And don't forget to head over to naturebox.com forward slash Gemma and claim your free snacks, I know you're going to love them. And I'll see you back here really soon for more Bigger Bolder Baking. I'm so full of coffee, I'm actually stuffed of coffee. I'm going to stop drinking it.