What I baked: Nutella Brownies

I love Oprah.  More specifically, I love Oprah magazine.  Luckily, I let myself splurge a whole $5 on a magazine subscription around Christmas last year so I have recently started enjoying not waiting until someone brings their heavily thumbed copy into work.  There was a recipe for Chocolate Hazelnut (duh, Nutella!) brownies this past month that I have been thinking about a lot lately, so when I got an invite to a birthday potluck and didn't have a lot of time to make anything involved, the Nutella brownies were my first choice.

My pin of these brownies is hilarious, it's a photo of the recipe in the magazine.  Oh. so. low-fi.  I have learned to trust recipes from sources like magazines, food websites, and other places where it's reasonable to assume they have money for research and a test kitchen.   Food blogs can be extremely hit or miss and Pinterest is way sketchy.  Anyway, the recipe is super simple and as I trust Oprah with sweets (and money to fund research on them!), I went for it.

Oprah's Nutella Brownies

1 jar Nutella (about 1 1/4 cups)

1/4 cup water

2 eggs

2/3 cup all purpose flour
3/4 tsp. kosher salt

Preheat oven to 350.  Line an 8' pan with foil.
Whisk together first Nutella, water, and egg. 
Stir in flour and salt.
Transfer to pan and bake 20-25 minutes, until edges are just set.  Set aside and let cool completely.
Using foil to lift, remove from pan, cut, and serve.

I added some cinnamon because I am Mexican and want to put cinnamon in everything, plus I was worried they'd taste a little flat.  They turned out pretty delicious, nothing to freak out over like brownies from my friend Sweet Rush, who won the freaking Blue Ribbon at the MN State Fair, but still good.  She was not there to judge, I sort of wish she would have been as the resident expert!  There were boys at the party and we all know they'll eat anything, plus a girlfriend who doesn't do a lot of sweets.  The cinnamon helped the flavor somewhat but I think next time I might get creative on them and add some tiny chocolate chips, hazelnuts, or even some dried cherries (thanks, Google).  They were more of a cake texture rather than fudgey, I might look into gooing them up a little too as I find that more appealing.  Also, they were rather flat in the pan, I guess I am used to the big American slabs of brownie but that's probably due to the physics of Nutella or whatever.  I enjoyed Oprah's recipe as did the birthday girl and friends at the potluck, her boyfriend took most of the leftovers so he must have liked them or had a good idea of where to get rid of them.  Yay!