The Big Bhang and Other Brownie Moments

I’m making my first batch of hemp brownies tonight. Yes, the kind that’s interspersed with actual Cannabis sativa seed—those happy little nubules that would, when not suspended in a bowl of chocolate lava and subjected to 350° heat in a Maytag oven, blossom into marijuana (aka bhang), ripe with the promise of ropes, joints, and hashish.

I laughed when I saw the box on the co-op’s dessert shelf: “Hemp Plus™ Brownie Mix” from Nature’s Path. Organic and “Quick & Easy” into the bargain. I’ve never tried pot or any other recreational drug, but the box brought back memories of the ’70s when baking hashish into brownies was all the rage. I still remember that Barney Miller episode when Wojo’s girlfriend brings a plate of brownies to the precinct and all the detectives get giddy, not knowing the stuff is spiked with hash.

While I don’t expect to get happy off of anything more than the chocolate, I did doctor tonight’s mix with a generous tablespoon of extra cocoa (organic), another of wheat germ (just for the heck of it), and two eggs (per the box’s instructions for added moistness—not much is worse than a dry brownie).

At this point in my life, I dare to call myself a brownie aficionado. OK—a brownie snob. At least of the boxed kind. Duncan Hines was the best when I was a kid. Moist, chewy, chocolaty. Hands-down better than what that upstart Ms. Betty Crocker or that puddin’-bellied Pillsbury boy could muster.

Then I discovered Ghirardelli’s at Costco a few years ago. A typically humongous box that I could barely palm in one hand, but packed with three—count ’em, three—floppy plastic bags full of a magic brown powder that cooks up into the most gloriously fudgy gooey cakey brownie that has ever come out of a home oven. I could eat my way through a pan in two days flat—but usually manage to stretch it to three.

The mix is studded with bits of Ghirardelli chocolate—none of the sissy Hershey’s or Nestle’s chips here. These brownies are like eating a chocolate cake candy bar—meltable yet chewable, thick enough to cleave your tongue to the roof of your mouth, but not so cloying as to take your teeth with it. A close-your-eyes-and-moan kind of brownie.

For several years I always had at least one triple-bag box of Ghirardelli brownies stashed in the cupboard. It came in handy for an emergency dose of chocolate on a Saturday after a long week. Baking up two bags at once made a fast, sure-fire 13x9 offering at any party or potluck. So I was pretty pissed at Costco when they recently replaced the top-notch Ghirardelli brand with a mix by the more pedestrian Hershey people. It’s like being able to drive a Porsche for years and then one morning finding a Kia in my garage.

Those Ghirardelli’s brownies are the closest thing I’ve gotten to reclaiming the delight of splitting a slab of mouth-watering brownie with my husband on the sidewalk outside of Harrod’s in London. We’d spent a long day touring London’s streets and wandered into the Food Halls at Harrod’s. The Food Hall itself is a destination site. This was in the mid ’90s, in the days before upscale grocery stores began catering to the fresh-food takeaway crowd in the U.S. Even today, you wouldn’t go to Nordstrom’s or Sears to buy meat and cheese for the evening’s supper. You can at Harrod’s.

We inevitably gravitated toward the dessert counter, where we breathed on the curved glass and oohed and aahed over the delectable offerings. Cheesecake wedges and petit-four squares, domed truffles and flat cookies, rounds of fruit tarts and miniature trifles, and—oooh, yummy! A whole tray of fresh brownies. Our mutual weakness.

The squares were big enough to tile a bathroom. They were also frosted. I usually steer clear of frosted brownies because the only reason to frost them is to try to salvage a dry brownie—and there’s not much worse than a dry brownie. But, hey, this is Harrod’s. We have to try it.

So the lady wraps a square of waxed paper around the biggest brownie in the bunch and exchanges it for our British pound notes over the glass case. I am surprised at the heft of this brownie. It must weigh half a pound. We grab napkins and look around for somewhere in the Food Hall to sit and share our booty. No such luck. No tables. No benches. Not a chair in sight. Irritated at this lack of nicety in a food hall, we thread our way out of the store in hopes of finding a bench outside. No such luck. No benches. No nearby park. Not even a stoop to sit on.

So we use the nearest thing onto which we can hitch a seat bone—a 3" beveled ledge that’s built into the side of the Harrod’s building and that’s far too low to be truly comfortable. We half prop, half push ourselves straight-legged against the wall, unfold the wax paper from the brownie, and realize that neither of us thought to grab forks.

No mind. Thumb and fingers dig into the frosting and the brownie’s soft underbelly as we each ease off a piece to pop it into our mouths. Heaven. Absolute heaven. Fudgy and cakey and just enough sweet. Squeeze it through the teeth, swish it out of the cheek folds, chew it and melt it at the same time. Smile and lick fingers and catch crumbs from falling—we don’t want to waste any of it. We linger half an hour over the luscious lump and are buzzed for the rest of the afternoon. Definitely a 10 in both brownie legend and travel memories.

And as for the hemp brownies I made tonight? A bhang gone bhust. I’d hate to find out how dry they would have been without the eggs I added. I give them a 4 and won’t do them again.