It’s hot outside again—so hot, in fact, that she barely has any interest in eating the croissant she buys this morning. She takes it from the paper bag; it’s still warm from the oven and the heat of it has started to leave a moist imprint against the bottom of the bag. She tears off a piece from the end and a shower of flakes fall onto her lap, like a dusting of buttery snow. She sighs, and puts the croissant back down on the picnic table, where he grabs at it, almost toppling over backwards on his unsteady legs.
“Easy,” she chides him, and he presses the length of his body against her torso, sturdy and sticky with sweat already. It’s not even 9 AM but he’s constantly in motion, his small legs churning, his arms pumping comically at his sides.
Her iced coffee is hidden underneath the picnic bench; whenever he hears a truck drive by and looks away, she picks it up and takes a long sip. It tastes like melted coffee ice cream: Her order is “half milk, half coffee, vanilla syrup”—a beverage that has never occurred to her before this week, but a woman in front of her ordered that exact combination the other day and she suddenly was sure it was the only thing she wanted to drink.
Yesterday her co-workers were bemoaning the heat—”It’s too hot to bake,” they all said, and she privately thought that was silly. If you want a brownie, you want a brownie, humidity be damned. In fact, she’s already made a batch this week. She brought three, warm from the oven, over to friends to eat in the waning dusky sunlight last night and they split them in half, passing them around the table.
Everyone sat, their fingers sticky with chocolate, contentedly eating. The grill was on, emanating enough hot air that she pictured a frame in an Archie comic where wiggly lines depicted heat coming off the sidewalk.
“Is this fudge or a brownie?” Reid muses aloud. A spirited discussion commences—what does make fudge fudge? Elizabeth swears that a brownie has to have flour in it. “Otherwise it’s just chocolate, like, with some eggs I think. So, a chocolate bar.”
This leads everyone to questions of other foods: What makes a sandwich a sandwich? A consensus is reached that a sandwich does have to include bread. The definition of a burger is more contentious. Reid is addicted to the tuna burger at Cafe Cluny and when Jules tells him that’s both a pretentious preference and not a real burger, he throws a tortilla chip at her and accidentally spatters guacamole over Gretchen’s pink shift dress.
There’s general chaos while Reid runs for seltzer and tries to dab it off with a cocktail napkin and everyone else critiques his form: “You’re doing it wrong! Closer to her boob!” and “This is absolutely the meet-cute in a bad romantic comedy” and “Reid, you know guac is extra”.
By the time dinner is ready (grilled salmon with a lemon herb butter, grilled eggplant, and grilled corn), the plate of brownies has been demolished, leaving only a few crumbs and a chocolatey streak on the corner of the table where Elizabeth grabbed to catch herself when her chair tipped over backwards from laughing so hard during the guacamole debacle.
She gathers the dirty plate, making room for Gretchen to set the table with clean plates, a carafe of ice water, cutlery, lemongrass candles, and two bottles of the wines they picked up at Macari earlier that day, when they spent three hours tasting wine flights and eating butter crackers in the sun at the vineyard: Katherine’s Field Sauvignon Blanc and Dos Aguas White.
“Just so everyone knows,” she says loudly, “A brownie does have to have flour in it, otherwise yes it’s just fudge. And I can’t eat fudge since that time Gretchen and I ate so much at the candy counter on Nantucket that I almost threw up before Emily’s rehearsal dinner. Not to bring up a sore subject. But these brownies happen to be gluten-free and use only rice flour, which is why they’re so fudgy! Aaaaand that concludes my baking lesson for the evening.”
Reid gives a polite golf clap and from the kitchen, Matthew calls out “Hear, hear!” and then someone turns up the stereo and the evening proceeds to slip into night, taking on a pleasantly blurry quality she loves: flickers of candlelight, the clinking of glasses, splashes from the pool, laughter swirling around it all, the smell of grilled seafood and citronella.
Fudgy Pecan Brownies (Gluten-Free)
Makes one 8” square pan
6 tablespoons (84g) unsalted butter
1/3 cup (47g) white rice flour
1/4 cup (21g) cocoa powder
1/4 teaspoon espresso powder (optional, for enhanced chocolate flavor)
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups (340g) semisweet chocolate chips
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 eggs
2/3 cup (76g) chopped toasted pecans
3/4 cup (148g) granulated sugar
Preheat oven to 350° F. Grease an 8" x 8" baking pan and line with it parchment paper. (I like to leave a few inches of overhang on the sides to make it easy to lift the cooled brownies out).
Melt together the butter and chocolate chips (you can either do this on the stovetop or in the microwave in 30-second increments, stirring between each), until smooth. Let cool slightly.
In a separate bowl, whisk together the rice flour, cocoa powder, espresso powder (if using), and salt.
Add the sugar and vanilla to the melted chocolate/butter mixture. Mix until smooth.
Mix in the eggs, one at a time, until the batter is smooth.
Add the dry ingredients and mix thoroughly. Stir in the toasted pecans.
Pour the batter into your prepared pan and bake for about 40 minutes (depending on how gooey you want them! You can bake them longer, or keep them softer if you like—when they are gooier they freeze well)—keep checking after 40 minutes and take them out when a tester or knife inserted into the center comes out with just a few moist crumbs clinging to it.
Let the brownies cool fully in the pan before slicing and serving.