Coffee and almond flavored brownies with melted chocolate, dried cherries and pecans

You see a lot of stuff about fudge VS cake regarding chocolate brownies, or chewy VS cake. 

A chocolate brownie is a slightly undercooked collapsed cake. The reason the cake collapsed is because it had insufficient leaven to begin with. The leaven that results in cake instead of brownie is egg and baking powder. Back off from those two ingredients in order to get a brownie. The batter is stiff. Real stiff. The only liquid is egg and vanilla, or possibly Kahlua. The batter is baked incompletely to ensure a soft gooey center but enough to produce a crackled surface.

The most difficult thing is to purposefully undercook the batter. This batter was baked at 350℉  for 18 minutes. The timer was set for 20 minutes but the moment I caught the first whiff of cooked chocolate I leapt to my feet and removed the pan before the timer went off. The batch turned out perfectly cooked, so I recommend the whiff method of determining timing with a backup timer set to lower than you imagine cake would take. 

* 1/2 cup butter

*  1 cup sugar (I used 1/2 brown sugar this time)

*  3/4 cup flour

*  1/4 cup chocolate

*  1 or 2 tablespoons cocoa powder

*  1/3 cup dry cherries

*  3/4 cup pecans

*  1 teaspoon vanilla extract

*  1/2 teaspoon instant espresso 

*  few drops almond extract

*  1/2 teaspoon salt

Obviously I didn't measure anything, but I sort of did because I used a measured cup to scoop the flour and pour the sugar, and the butter is marked off in tablespoons so I can determine a half a cup from the butter wrapper.  I think brownies are a chance to be careless. Either cream the sugar into the butter together or melt the butter and mix with all the other ingredients. Adjust the flour to achieve an excessively stiff batter.  

This batch differed from all previous batches because I melted butter and chocolate together and because I included dried cherries. The amount of chocolate that was melted was the amount remaining in the bag of chocolate chips. I thought the amount of chocolate chips was insufficient and so intended to supplement with dry cocoa, but the small amount of chips darkened the batter so much that I then debated using the cocoa. I decided to double up because the batter seemed too wet. I felt it could use a little more flour to stiffen it along with a little cocoa powder. I included dry cherries because I saw them first in the pantry when I went for dried cranberries.