It’s too hot to turn on the oven, but I was craving brownies, so I thought I’d re-visit the thought of making them in the microwave. If nothing else, this is way cheaper and healthier than those microwavable brownie bowls from Betty Crocker.
This is basically my regular brownie recipe, halved, with a couple of tweaks.
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup flour
1/4 cup cocoa (dark is best!)
pinch of salt*
4 Tbls olive oil*
1 egg
1/2 tsp vanilla (or do what I do, and just slosh a little bit into the bowl)
Add the dry ingredients together and mix thoroughly, then add the wet and mix. It will be fairly stiff (half-way between cake batter and cookie dough in consistency). Spoon into a shallow, greased soup bowl. (I used the left-over olive oil that had collected in the bottom of the measuring cup.)
Microwave for about two minutes. This is the only tricky part, since every microwave is different. If you don’t nuke it long enough, it’ll be too gooey. Not that I believe there’s such a thing as too gooey. Too long, and it will burn, and that would be a sad thing, indeed. My microwave seems to be permanently stuck on Chernobyl, so two minutes works well for me. This also assumes your microwave has a turntable. If not, you may want to rotate 1/4 turn every 30 seconds or so.
* The original recipe calls for melted butter. I didn’t feel like melting it, so I used olive oil. If you use olive oil or unsalted butter, you’ll want to add a pinch of salt. If you use salted butter, omit the salt.
red paper boat 