OK, so two things about this post should blow your mind: (1) this is the only brownie recipe on my blog so far (how is this possible when I love chocolate as much as I do?!) and (2) Dan is back in the kitchen…baking…from scratch. Actually, if you know Dan at all, that second thing probably blows your mind three times over.

It’s not that Dan doesn’t bake — he has, on occasion, been known to bake things. For example, there was the chocolate chip cookie cake he made me for my birthday when we started dating. (It was heart shaped and frosted, and super delicious.) And he sometimes made brownies for himself when he was living alone. But this is his first time baking without the help of his friend Betty Crocker and her oh-so-convenient box mixes.

I’ve been bullying Dan for weeks to do another “Dan in the Kitchen” post for me, and when I told him it had to be a dessert made from scratch he was less than pleased. See him eyeing the ingredients very skeptically in the second picture? That’s him thinking “Man, what a pain! Why are you doing this to me, Tina?”

I’ve always thought that baking would come naturally to Dan since he’s an engineer and follows strict step-by-step procedures for a living. Whereas I tend to just throw ingredients willy nilly into the bowl and hope for the best, he obsesses over measurements and temperatures and what all the ingredients do. It’s actually really embarassing when he asks me a question about ingredient substitution or something technical like that, and I don’t know how to answer. I mainly tweak things by feel, so it’s hard to explain the process sometimes. “Well…you just kinda do this…and use that…and then it just works!” probably isn’t the most satisfying response for someone who’s trying to learn, but hey, look how well everything turned out this time!

These brownies are seriously yummy, guys. Intensely chocolate-y, rich, moist, and wonderfully chewy. Dan did good…real good.

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