On Brownies

Or banana bread or whatever you want to call them!

Happy Friday! This is the weekly recipe post for paid subscribers, and it is the actual very first recipe I ever developed. On Tuesday, all readers will receive a piece on shadows that has been percolating in my brain for quite some time. There is a hard stop ahead, which sucks, but hey: it’s this or endless ads on a website, so here we are!

Today, I’m psyched to share with you the first actual recipe I ever developed: one-bowl brownies, but vegan, double-chocolate, banana bread-type brownies. That you make with one bowl. What on earth can I possibly call it besides one-bowl brownies? The world’s most perfect, decadent, idiot-proof dessert? I don’t know. We’ll workshop it.

Hailing from my freshman year dorm room, which happened to be right next door to the building’s only oven, this recipe is, yes, technically banana bread, but it is so chocolatey and gooey that I kind of really strongly believe you could pass this off as brownies. I, for example, hate bananas—truly hate, like, if Colin has had one to eat, he has to brush his teeth because the smell of them makes me gag—and even I love this dessert. Shoutout to the loads of chocolate in this recipe for masking the worst taste in the world!

Back to the bread/brownies. Imagine, if you will, me at age 18, desperate to make friends in college but not really sure how. Sad, missing home, not sure what to do with the time that I was newly in charge of managing for myself (besides skip statistics at least once a week), I baked a pan of brownies. All of the sudden, there were people around, eating brownies, chatting and laughing. I kept baking brownies, tweaking the recipe based on requests and ingredients available, and people kept showing up to eat them. Over 10 years later (woof), I still bake these brownies and hang out with some of the people who have been taste-testing these for me since day one. If that’s not a successful food origin story, I don’t know what is!

When I make this recipe, I get sentimental: because making these was the first time I really felt like I was doing something I was interested in doing (sorry, statistics was simply not it) and because it marks the moment in which I discovered that food can be a medium through which people connect. And I love both of those things for little 18-year-old me. So enjoy some banana bread/brownies and share them with someone you love.

Please note: the recipe below does not call for vegan chocolate, but if that’s something you feel strongly about, you know what to do. You can make this conventional instead of vegan very easily: just use a regular egg in place of the vegan egg. If you don't have coconut oil on hand, use vegetable or canola oil. Butter will change the texture of the final product, though I’m sure it would still be delicious!

One Bowl Brownies Slash Banana Bread