The Best Cocoa Brownies

Often, for me, the measure of a good cookbook is in the success of the very first recipe that I attempt from it. If it emerges a raving success, I gleefully congratulate myself on money well spent and bring out the Post-It stickies to flag yet other recipes I'd like to try. By that merit alone, one of my latest purchases, Alice Medrich's Bittersweet, was a tremendous hit.

Because my schedule of late hasn't really permitted me to do much in the kitchen other than boil water for pasta or make scrambled eggs, I was looking for something simple yet satisfying. Sweets for the stressed, is what I like to call the fat food that my colleagues and I munch helplessly at our desks during the last month of every quarter when impossible deadlines and printing schedules collide.

These moist, chewy, dark as midnight brownies were everything that Ms Medrich promised. There is not a drop of real chocolate in it, but the three-quarter cup plus two tablespoons of the best Dutch-processed cocoa made these intensely chocolately, and received an A for both taste and texture. They are, as they have been named by the author, The Best Cocoa Brownies ever. I can't wait to try more of her recipes.