Butterscotch Sea Salt Brownies

I don’t know about you but I’m a sucker for brownies. I’ve been dying to search through techniques that make that perfectly crinkly top and a nice soft bite, that’s not TOO gooey, but just right.

Today I’ve got a recipe that incorporates sea salt and butterscotch flavors to create a decadent, thick and chocolaty dessert, with a tinge of sea salt to really bring out the delicious sweetness.

Cornstarch: The added cornstarch makes a HUGE difference. Even using ⅓ of the required amount won’t yield the same crinkly and shiny top to your brownies. Not only this but it creates a better texture for the brownies to help balance out the denseness of them.

Sugar and Melted Butter: Mixing the granulated sugar into the melted butter helps the sugar dissolve thoroughly into the batter and helps produce that shiny crust we all look for in our brownies.

Melted Chocolate or Chocolate Chips: The addition of any chocolate, no matter the form will always produce a shinier crust. This could be due to the fat content within the melted chocolate that combats the water content from the butter, which can sometimes prevent a crust from forming. I don’t know what to say scientifically about the chocolate chips but they yield the same results!

No leavening agent: I omitted the baking powder in my recipe because I like a thick fudgy brownies. BUT if you’re anything like my mother you like a bit of cakiness to it, so you can add about ¼ tsp of baking powder for that.

Melted Chocolate: The melted chocolate adds to the chewiness and fudginess of the brownies rather than just throwing who chocolate chips inside

Melted Butter: Melting the butter is the best way to ensure that fudgy center in your brownies because when you beat softened butter, you are creating air in the batter, causing the brownies to rise during the baking process.

You can easily turn this recipe into a normal brownie recipe by increasing the melted chocolate chips to ¾ cup and omitting the butterscotch chips and sea salt. This will still leave you with a fudgy brownie with that to die for crinkly top.

Here are some other popular quick brownie additives that you can get creative with:

• Nuts (pecans, walnuts, etc)
• Mint extract instead of vanilla extract for Mint Chocolate Brownies (leave me a comment if you’d like to see a recipe for these!)
• Caramel Drizzle
• Pretzels
• Chunks of Cookie Dough plopped in the batter after its poured in the pan
• Liquor (tongue out emoji) (specifically dark liquors like bourbon)

Outside of my baking experimentation, I found some of these awesome tips and science behind the baking through Tessa Aria’s “Best Ever Chewy Brownie Recipe” Article and Mark Bittman’s “How to Bake Everything” Book

If you love chocolate desserts check out my Mint Double Chocolate Chip Ice Cream Sandwiches. Let me know in the comment how the recipe came out for you!