Gingerbread Brownies. You will want these. Bad.

I found this recipe on Ryan's Baking Blog. He found it in a Martha Stewart Holiday Cooking magazine, which he received as "swag" while visiting the Martha Stewart show. To me, while being in this little small town, that means you're kinda famous. Ryan! You're kinda famous in these parts. I put the word "swag" in parenthesis because until I actually receive "swag" it's more of a novel concept to me than anything, born out of jealousy. All you big time fancy schmancy bloggers out there, just enjoy your "swag!" (I'll get there one day. Really I will.)

When I saw this recipe I knew I was going to make it. So it sat up at the top of my browser window for days; a tab, just hanging out and lurking, waiting to be utilized. Well, that day came - a week or so later - but it did. And I'm glad it did.

Ladies and Gentlemen, allow me to introduce, Gingerbread Brownies!

First things first, Ryan has it listed as a Chocolate Gingerbread Bar. I'm calling it a brownie. I'm just gonna go with it and I hope Ryan (or Martha) doesn't mind. I'm not understanding why it would be called a bar. Just can't wrap my head around it. So I'm gonna run with the brownie title, until a court-ordered injunction arrives. Although if a court-ordered anything arrives, I'll probably do what it says. Until then....

Gingerbread Brownies
Adapted from Ryan's Baking Blog

adapted from Martha Stewart Holiday Cookies Magazine
Makes 9 big brownies

4 tablespoons unsalted butter, melted and cooled, plus more for pan
1/4 cup unsweetened cocoa powder, plus more for pan
3/4 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon pumpkin pie spice
1/2 cup packed dark brown sugar
1/4 cup unsulfured molasses
1 egg, room temperature
1/4 cup sour cream
1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350°F. Butter an 8-inch square baking pan. Line the pan with parchment, leaving an overhang on two sides. Butter paper and dust whole pan with cocoa powder, tapping out the excess.

In a medium bowl, sift and whisk together cocoa powder, flour, baking soda, ginger, and pumpkin-pie spice.

In a large bowl, whisk together melted butter, brown sugar, molasses, egg, and sour cream. Add flour mixture, a little at a time, stirring until it is just moistened (do not overmix). Stir in chocolate chips (optional: mix a little cake flour in with the chocolate chips and toss around a bit to coat them, this prevents chocolate chips from sinking to the bottom). Transfer batter to prepared pan and use an offset spatula to smooth the top.

Bake, rotating pan halfway through, about 30 to 35 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted into the center comes out clean. Let cool in pan for 5 minutes before moving to a wire rack. Once cooled, cut into 2-inch squares. Bars can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature up to 5 days. If desired, dust with confectioners’ sugar before serving.

Preheat your oven. Yes, it's important. Get out your 8" square baking dish. Hey! I have one of those. I sprayed it with cooking spray and put a piece of parchment paper down so it was hanging off the sides. I sprayed it again with baking spray then dusted the pan - as well as I could - with Ghirardelli Ground Chocolate.  Let me say I was surprised to find I had Hershey's Unsweetened Cocoa in my house since I am of the mind that unsweetened chocolate - in any form - in blasphemous. But I didn't have much so I used the Ghirardelli to do the dusting and saved the unsweetened cocoa for the brownies. Or maybe I'm just making all that up.

I'll pause here to say I don't really know why this step is involved: the parchment and cocoa dusting. Although the brownies did release from the pan wayyyyyyyy easier than you ever thought possible. So I would suggest going ahead and following this step. But if you decide not to, and I won't blame you for a second, I don't think it will make any difference in the amazing flavor and moistness of these amazing bits of Heaven. But I'm jumping ahead...

Next comes the sifting and mixing of the dry ingredients. Here's how I do it:

I put my sifter right in the bowl where the dry ingredients are going to end up. (My favorite sifter is the type with the spinning handle, not so keen on the handle you squeeze over and over and over.)

Then I start measuring the flour. Note: Did you know the proper way to measure flour is to pour into the measuring cup either directly from the container or with a spoon? The air that is within the flour itself is an important component in baking. So you pour the flour into your measuring cup...

Then with a straight edge tool (Read: butter knife) you go back and forth, back and forth over the flour scraping off the excess. Then dump the contents into the sifter that is already placed over your bowl.

Notice that baking pan underneath the measuring cup? That is a staple to all my baking. I set that down and measure everything over it then I can just dump the pan off into the trashcan when I'm done. Virtually no mess. At least not on the counters. It's a perfect catchall for everything else too: broken eggshells, utensils that are mucky, butter wrappers, anything!

This recipe calls for Pumpkin Spice. Don't fret if you don't have any. Remember this gem of a post? Pumpkin Spice. Who knew? Problem solved.

Now you have all your dry ingredients sittin in your nifty sifter just waiting to get to work.

Work it!

Right here, the smell is incredible! Then grab your whisk and mix up that little powdery dreamscape.

Now for adding the liquid part. At this point I realized I had started with too small a bowl, so I did a quick relocation. No biggie. *In another bowl, a smaller one, we are going to mix all the liquid ingredients together. Add the melted butter.

Another note: I always break my eggs in a separate dish. I have fished enough eggshells out of batter, I could probably pave the driveway... and then some! And I just use another dish that I've already dirtied in the process. Here is the bowl I melted the butter in.

I think molasses in baked goods is always a pleasant touch. Normally I am not keen on measuring a liquid in a dry ingredient measuring cup, but I'm pretty lazy and I couldn't fathom imposing on my crystal clear clean liquid measuring cup for a lousy 1/4 of cup. Now, had the result not turned out the way it did I would probably be on my second batch using the proper measuring tool.

Mix it all up really well. I use the same whisk I mixed up the dry ingredients with.

I jumped ahead and got the chocolate chips ready. The recipe mentioned something interesting: cover the chocolate chips with a small amount of cake flour to keep them from sinking in the brownie mixture. Well, since I go through spells and a spell I had last summer was baking cakes, I just happened to have some cake flour so I thought I would give it a try.

I really do believe that if you do not add this step, I think you will be juuuuuuust fine.

This next mixing part can be a make or break step in brownies. This and the over-baking part. So let me walk you through this carefully. You are slowly going to add the dry ingredients to the liquid ingredients. So shake a little in - maybe a third of the bowl - then mix. At this point go ahead and grab a big wooden spoon or a rubber spatula. The batter gets thick and will stick in your whisk. The goal is to not mix it completely. I don't know why but a great tip I found recently is to mix until you can still see a little bit of flour. Does that make any sense at all? Lemme see if I can show you.

So we are mixing it all nice at first, gently but thoroughly. I added the chocolate chips at this point because I knew I would need to do more stirring to get them mixed in but did NOT want to over mix. It's getting thick so I'm going to grab my rubber spatula.

This is where I stopped. It's tough to see the flour because it's brown with the cocoa but you can still barely see some dry stuff in there.

I put it in the pan and smoothed it as much as I could. It was not easy with the cooking spray and cocoa the parchment was sliding everywhere and I was scared batter was heading down under the paper. So I pretty much left it as is and figured I couldn't go wrong at this point. Again, the smell is incredible!!!! Thanks again Ryan!

The recipe said 30-35 minutes, but I think I had to add at least an additional 5 - 7 minutes. Brownies are A) easy to overbake and B) hard to tell when they are done sometimes. These seemed done because the stick came out clean and the edges looked nice and dry. (Although the picture doesn't really show that.)

I let the pan cool for a bit. I'm sure I had children to retrieve from the tops of bookshelves or solicitors to scare off. The parchment paper sure did make it easy to pull up and out. Although I still can't decide if it was worth it. I don't see why not though. Sheesh! I can argue with myself all day long.

I made two even cuts in each direction making nine brownies. This was almost too big - even for me! The taste is exquisite. The gingerbread flavor is subtle but powerful. These brownies are moist and cake like. Yes, they are now added to my arsenal. Thanks again, Ryan!