Stovetop Brownies

Everyone said it couldn't be done.  Everyone on Yahoo! Answers, thekitchn.com, and chowhound.com said that it wasn't possible to bake brownies on the stove.  Searching for stovetop brownie recipes on Food.com, allrecipes.com, and epicurious.com did not yield any helpful advice.  The best anyone could suggest was thinning the batter to make brownie pancakes, which while potentially delicious, is just not the same.  So you can imagine the way my heart fluttered and then immediately sank when I opened the wrapped box of Ghiradelli brownie mix from Auntie Jean on Christmas day.  We lacked an oven.

I resigned myself to brownie-less disappointment for several days until the long New Year's weekend when I decided to just go for it.  I would probably end up with something edible in the end.  Hopefully.  The trick was going to be preventing the bottoms from burning while maintaining a high enough temperature to cook through the rest of the batter.  So after dinner, I bought some fresh eggs and assembled the ingredients.

Gathering the ingredients

I had a 9 or 10 inch skillet, cooking oil, and spoons already in the kitchen from our first weeks in Wudaokou, a large bowl from the Star Wars party which could be used for mixing, and boiled water in the kitchen carafe.  As I greased the skillet and started adding the ingredients to the mixing bowl, I felt like I was changing the game for the future of baking, like the chef who decided that foam was the next preparation method du jour or that sous vide somehow made a lot of sense.  I felt so avant garde, freed from the conventional ideas of what baking should be.  I felt like a badass.

Initially, I thought I would cook the brownie mix in two batches since a thinner layer would cook faster and be less likely to burn, but since the quantity of mix was normally only enough for a small 8x8 square pan (whatever happened to the 9x13" family size??), I decided on impulse to pour all of the batter in at once and cross my fingers.  I set the gas stove on low and put the lid on to try to hold in the heat.

Set to low heat

After several minutes, even I was surprised when the edges of the batter started to rise and bake and the center slowly bubbled.

Just crazy enough to work

Twenty-five minutes later, I decided that the batch looked about done, turned off the heat, and joined Muir to watch a movie and wait for the brownies to cool.  When the movie was over, we enjoyed a taste of our first batch of stovetop brownies.  And you know what?  The bottoms didn't burn, and while some parts were a little gooey (maybe 30 minutes would have been a little better), cooking brownies on the stove turns out to be entire possible.  Seriously, what do people on Yahoo! Answers know anyway?

Stovetop brownies WIN!