Brown butter lemonies

Where a brownie and a lemon bar meet

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If you know me and my palate I do not need to impress on you my love of lemons. So when we (me and Rach who works with me) saw lemon brownies popping up on our feeds we knew it was something that needed my attention. I’m not usually swayed by fast-paced recipe reels - sugar being thrown from a height into a bowl to a Sabrina Carpenter soundtrack. But these stayed with me and I wanted to eat a lemon brownie quite badly and I knew I could make them my way. Extra lemon, not too sweet and toasty from brown butter. 

These are for lemon lovers, essentially a brownie or blondie but with no chocolate and a lot of lemon instead. They are dense and fudgy, they have a pleasing lingering chew and the cracked crackle top that is the mark of a good brownie always. But when you bite into them they are a hit of sharp, sweet, life-affirming lemon. I am not one for humanising food but if I were to be a baked good, I’d probably choose these. 

I’ve been turning the title of this recipe over in my head for the last few days partly thanks to this bit of writing about recipe titles. For reasons too boring to mention, sleep has been lean the last few nights so I’ve had a lot of time to mull this over in the quiet of the night. 

I thought about Lemon brownies but then brownies surely have to have chocolate - though the texture of these Lemonies is dense and chewy like a brownie. I considered Lemondie, a portmanteau of lemon and blondie but then I wrote it down and realised it was a bad idea. I thought about Lemon Bars but that already belongs to the biscuity based, curd-topped ones. So I settled on Brown butter Lemonies. It's definitely twee, but there you go, I like it. 

My Lemonies were based on this recipe. But I took them a number of different ways - trying to make them exactly what I was imagining. We tried a lot of variations including but not limited to;

• with and without brown butter (a clear win for WITH) 

• with finely chopped lemon though the batter (ruined the chew)

• With finely sliced lemons on top (hard no - the acid messed with the cooking and left me with raw batter) 

• With egg yolks and whole eggs (we went for a mixture of both)

• With a miso swirl (the miso took away the shine of the lemon)

It felt very ‘test kitchen’ to be trying and labelling all the variations but the virgo in me really loved it and made me certain that is a recipe that I stand by. Inspired by a very 2024 sharp-cut-attention-grabbing reel but something I know I will be making for years. Sweet, but not too sweet, chewy and crunchy, with an edge from a lot of lemon.

Brown butter Lemonies

Where a brownie and a lemon bar meet.