Edgy

The other day I came across this odd baking pan from Baker's Edge, which allows you to bake brownies with at least two edges per brownie. My gut reaction was, "Why would anybody want two edges per brownie? One edge is disappointment enough; two seems like punishment." Look at all the corner pieces this pan will produce, which can only lead to heartache. I love gittin' me a solid center piece, whether it's cake or a brownie -- I love soft, puffy, cakey baked goods, not hard-around-the-edges also-rans.

I asked my good friend Norman, who's a bit of a brownie fiend, his opinion of the Baker's Edge pan, and his answer surprised me:

Re: edge lovers, I could write an essay about this relatively mundane matter. When it comes to brownies, I do like the vaguest hint of crisp, as it were, maybe only for the sake of variety (a la, on the savory side, mac-&-cheese "skin") or for my subconscious need to establish that the brownies were indeed submitted to a high temperature for an appreciable amount of time. A single narrow edge is sufficient (and hardly critical), and unlike w/ a frosted cake, I would never opt for a corner piece. Of course, any outer brownie runs a greater risk of what plagues far too many of its brethren, wherever their original placement in the pan: dryness. A scoop of vanilla ice cream is an ideal corrective and should be on hand in any event.

Huh. I would have pegged Norman as a soft-and-puffy fellow, but I did know about his fondness for "skin." He went on to compliment the brownies I bake: "The delightful peanut butter chunks in your recipe perform, among other things, a similar function [to ice cream] and have taken me to a new level of brownie appreciation." Awfully sweet of him, especially considering I use a mix from Betty Crocker. On the (very rare) occasions that I do want to bake brownies from scratch, I use this unusual recipe.