The Best Chocolate Brownie Cake

Grandma’s Brownie Cake

A few years ago my grandma gave everybody in the family a cookbook of recipes that she loves along with some fun stories to go along with it. Talk about vintage recipes right? Some of them I’m not sure how to try because ingredients aren’t readily available anymore. Some of them have been family favorites for years like this homemade chicken noodle soup and pizza loaf. And some of them – like his chocolate brownie cake – have become new favorites! I remember having these growing up but just recently tried making them on my own, and they’re just as good as I remember. If you like brownies, you’re going to love these brownie balls!

Why you’ll love this recipe

Ingredients

Ingredient Notes

Buttermilk – if you don’t have buttermilk, combine 1/2 cup milk with 1/2 TBS lemon juice or distilled white vinegar and let it sit for about 10 minutes. Homemade buttermilk! Chopped walnuts – I prefer this with the walnuts on top but just like in this chocolate chip zucchini bread, the walnuts are optional if you’re concerned about nut allergies.

Instructions

Preheat your oven and grease a large baking sheet like this one. Mix the flour and sugar in a large bowl and set aside. Heat a pot on the stove over medium-high heat to start making the chocolate part of the batter. Melt butter. Once melted, add your cocoa powder and water and bring the mixture to a boil. Add the boiling chocolate mixture to the flour mixture from earlier and stir until well combined. Add buttermilk, eggs, baking soda, and vanilla to the mixture and combine until you have a nice smooth batter. Pour the batter into the prepped baking sheet and bake in the oven for 20-22 minutes or until the cake is cooked all the way through. While the cake is baking, make your icing. It’ll seem very similar to what you did for the cake batter but the results are totally different. Start by heating a pot to medium-high heat and adding butter. Melt the butter then add the cocoa and milk to the melted butter. Bring the mixture to a boil. Put your powdered sugar into a small bowl then pour the boiled mixture (deja vu anyone?) over the powdered sugar and stir to combine to make your icing. Ice cake within five minutes of removing cake from the oven. Top with chopped walnuts if desired. If not, you’re done and skip the final step – cutting the cake! Allow the cake to cool completely then cut into squares and serve either by itself or a la mode with a little (or a lot) of ice cream. Or go all out and make it a chocolate brownie cake sundae! That sounds pretty delicious right about now!

Expert Tips

Add the walnuts immediately after adding the icing rather than waiting until it hardens. This will keep the nuts from falling off when you slice the cake (kind of like dipping rainbow donuts in sprinkles while the frosting is still warm). Use a spatula to make sure that the chocolate brownie cake batter spreads around the entire sheet pan in one even layer. Leave the chocolate brownie cake in the pan rather than slicing it all and removing for storage. I recommend just covering it with something like this sheet pan lid. Remove the chocolate mixtures from heat as soon as they start boiling, don’t let them keep boiling or you’ll lose some of the moisture in the cake and icing. Use a small rectangle spatula to remove the cake squares from the pan without destroying the rest of the squares.