Brownie points
My attempt at replicating my mother’s famous brownies. Photo: Brittany Robins.
Since before I was born, my mother’s favorable reputation in the kitchen was bolstered by the mystique of her special brownie recipe. While she is more of a taster than a measurer when she cooks, she is laser-sharp meticulous when it comes to the baking of these sweet treats.
What makes these brownies so unique is that they are a brownie-cake hybrid. While the base is made up of typical ingredients like butter, flour, eggs, sugar and unsweetened chocolate, it’s what gets piled on top that incites pure euphoria in the mouth. She scatters a layer of marshmallows over the cooked brownie batter and broils it in the oven until golden and gooey. Then she makes her famous icing, which includes cocoa powder, confectioners sugar, heaps of butter and her secret weapon, sour cream. This gives the icing a little tangy punch to cut through what would otherwise be a cloyingly sweet confection. The icing is lathered on so thick that it is nearly as dense as the brownie itself.
Hot out of the oven: a layer of broiled marshmallows melt over the brownies. Photo: Brittany Robins.
This delicious dessert (albeit laborious to make) only appeared at our house during the Jewish holidays. There was one instance, a few years ago, when my mother decided she was too fatigued to make the brownies, knowing she would have to swap out her usual batter recipe for a less palatable Passover-friendly alternative. When the dessert spread was laid out and the brownies were nowhere to be found, most of the 20 guests booed and pounded the table with their fists, having expected to end the meal with those reliably decadent brownies. Many complained they had attended the dinner under false pretenses. After this, my mother vowed to always include brownies on the menu, no matter what.
Growing up, nothing made my older sister and me happier than eagerly waiting, like panting puppies, for the remnants of our mother’s brownie. One of us would receive the bowl; the other, the spatula, and we would go to town, licking those appliances clean. We often brokered deals with each other based on whichever object had more residual icing than the other. This was the highlight of our holidays, more so than actually eating the brownies at the table, because there was something comforting and sensuous about sitting in the kitchen, immediately reaping the benefits of our mother’s culinary prowess.
The luscious icing consists of cocoa powder, confectioner’s sugar, butter and sour cream. Photo: Brittany Robins.
However, when I hit puberty, I began to struggle with my weight—I was by no means portly, but I could stand to lose a good 10 to 15 pounds. My mom and sister were both model-thin, and I was the anomaly of the family. My mother, bless her heart, tried everything to get me to shed weight, but eventually her frustration grew to anger and she started to restrict what I ate.
On one holiday in particular, I remember happening upon the cake plate that held a mound of those brownies beneath a translucent cloche. I gawked at the tan squares longingly. My mother, catching a glimpse of this, made her way over to me and whispered in my ear, “When you lose those 10 pounds, you can have one.”
My mother doesn’t recall saying that to me, but those words had an indelible effect on a child with an already tarnished self-image. When I turned 19, I decided to make a drastic lifestyle change, because I could no longer stomach that feeling of shame and disappointment I had felt radiating from my mother.
I began running and revamped my diet, but then I took it too far. I would sprint for nine miles each day and sustain myself on a meager diet of cucumbers, peppers and grapes. I developed a serious phobia of not only sugar (with the exception of fruit), but also carbohydrates. People lauded me for my ascetic sense of discipline, but really, it was just a glossy mask for a convoluted eating disorder.
Today, I have a much healthier relationship with food and fitness. I consciously curtail my workouts before they become excessive, and I enjoy a more varied diet, incorporating foods I used to shy away from. But the fear of consuming desserts is an ongoing battle.
I have not taken so much as a bite of my mom’s delectable brownies since I was young. Now I experience joy in a different way; baking them for the people I care about most, and seeing their faces light up with the same child-like innocence that I once had as a kid.
Your Comments