Recipe Background

This recipe for Crowd Pleasing Brownies is easy for the cook and is great when you need to serve a lot of people,or people who eat a lot of chocolate!. It can be prepared in 15 minutes and only takes 30 minutes to bake. This is a great recipe to bring to a party; I even bring right in the pan sometimes. My kids along with their friends can easily polish this off in a weekend. If the amount of butter and sugar gives you pause, remember this is the equivalent of a quadruple batch of brownies! I would recommend that you watch the cooking time. I have found about 27 minutes is just right in my oven. If you cook it too long, the brownies along the edges will be hard to cut (they'll still taste good though!)

Crowd Pleasing Brownies

4 sticks (1 pound) of butter (I use 2 sticks salted and 2 sticks unsalted)
4 cups sugar
4 eggs
2 cups flour
1 1/3 cups unsweetened cocoa powder (comes in a can in the baking aisle)
1 teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon vanilla extract
2 cups chopped walnuts (optional)

Preheat the oven to 350'F. Grease and flour a 12"x17"x1" jelly roll pan (a cookie sheet with sides on it). Melt the butter and add the melted butter to the sugar in a large mixing bowl or stand mixer and mix well. Add the eggs and the vanilla, and continue to mix. In a separate bowl, combine the flour, cocoa powder, and salt. Add the flour mixture to the butter mixture and stir until just combined (don't over mix). The batter will be very thick and I do find that a stand mixer or electric mixer helps to combine these ingredients. Using a spoon, fold in the walnuts.

Transfer the batter into the pan. Because the mixture is so thick, I find that it works best to place the batter in the prepared pan by spooning 8-12 heaping spoonfuls in different places in the pan and then using the back of a spoon to "connect" the piles of batter. Anyway you do it, just make sure the batter is distributed evenly in the pan.

Bake at 350'F for 25-30 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool. You may find it easier to cut these if you allow them to cool about 10 minutes and then run a table knife between the edge of the brownies and the pan. Then allow to fully cool before cutting into squares.

Makes about 50 2" brownies.

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