Cocoa brownies

So my husband walks into the kitchen the other day; he stops, sniffs, turns around, and says: "Are you making brownies?"

"No," I say. I had just cooked something else, so the kitchen smelled like something, but it wasn't brownies.

A pause, and then, wistfully: "Could you?"

Dude never asks for anything, food-wise. Never. I can't even get him to express an opinion on his preferences for the week's dinners, when asked directly. He must want them pretty bad, and I can't possibly say no to that. So I ask him what kind he wants; I've been playing with my butterscotch brownies recipe, attempting variations on it: we had a successful orange brownie, and an incredibly good coconut-spice brownie.

Another pause, and then, hesitantly, "Chocolate?"

Ruh-roh. I don't know how to make chocolate brownies, except out of a box. I don't know how to make good chocolate brownies at all.

I experimented with them once or twice, once upon a time, because they're the freaking standard brownie: something I should know how to make. But they weren't awesome, and I hadn't tried again yet. I'm not a chocolate addict, so we wouldn't normally have the right ingredients on hand, either, except that cocoa was among the versatile-and-fairly-nonperishable ingredients I decided I should learn to use, to expand my options for those desperate pantry-dinner nights. (Like rice, canned beans, sage from the monster plant in the herb garden...)

A long time ago, I'd bookmarked Smitten Kitchen's Best Cocoa Brownies as a recipe I wanted to try but never got around to, so now was the time. And they were AWESOME.

For the step with heating the butter/sugar/etc., I melted the butter in the microwave and then stirred the other ingredients in. It worked fine for me. I boggled at the large amount of cocoa and small amount of flour - I have never done such a thing before, and worried that the lack of flour would make them turn out very gooshy - but it turned out just fine. The cocoa must stand in structurally for the flour somehow, I don't know how that works. I baked them for 35 minutes, and let them sit and cool for an hour or two before I tried to take them out of the pan.

Our house is now covered in chocolate brownie crumbs, and I'm going to have to get more cocoa soon, because I may only have enough for one more batch, and that is eventually going to be a problem.