Three Ingredient Nutella Brownies and I LOVE PEOPLE

Hey you guys!!  Happy Saturday 🙂  I wrote the bulk of this post last night, but left it unpublished overnight just to make sure there wasn’t any Malbec-inspired craziness slipped in.  Which is perfect because it gives me time to slip in now the fact that my faith in humanity has been restored.  While a lot of the time, people really do suck, sometimes, they really really don’t.  I’m at the point in the semester where I’m completely stressed and capable of crying over nothing at the drop of a hat.

So when I finally got situated in my second choice cafe (Starbucks was full – since when is anyone in the Ghetto awake and functioning before noon?), ordered my tea latte, and sat down to work, I realized I’d left my headphones in my apartment.  Major ish.  I spent all morning staging my apartment since it’s being shown this afternoon by a potential renter – {I’m hoping if I make it nice now, they won’t have to show it again.}  I really really really didn’t want to leave, I just got a perfect spot, near an outlet, which is serious gold.  And I just ordered.  A whole big tea.

So I did it.  I asked the girl down the booth, a totally random girl, if she would watch my stuff while I ran home and back.  God bless her.  She even offered me her headphones, which is super sweet, but I’m kinda a germaphobe, and she was fine watching my stuff.  Now I don’t know if you’ve ever ran two blocks (four, round trip) in knee high rain boots.  Definitely entertaining for whoever saw me.  But I got back, got the headphones, and all my stuff is still here.  So serious thank you to the Girl in the Ghetto.  It’s really the little things, people, that make me love people.  Humanity doesn’t have to suck.  I think I’m gonna pay it forward.

So now to the recipe…

I don’t remember what I was doing yesterday when I came across this recipe.  Probably trying to concentrate on a paper I’m writing.  Which obviously went well if I found a brownie recipe.  But that’s how it goes.  The guy who has the desk across from mine at the library wasn’t there yesterday, at least not when I was, and there was no one to awkwardly kick or get kicked by every five minutes when one of us crosses or uncrosses our legs, which totally threw off my whole study vibe.

You can find the recipe here.  I was a bit iffy about it, because, Nutella is delicious, but it’s also hydrogenated, and the love I feel for it is almost automatically overshadowed by guilt for feeding my body pure crap.  Which is probably why this recipe is so perfect for me.  Because, and I understand this is a total and complete First World Problem, but, if you don’t finish the Nutella in time, it separates in the jar.  The bottom gets hard and thick and unspreadable, and the top is just a slimy mess of hydrogenated oil.  The same thing happens if you buy natural peanut butter, but with Nutella it’s so much worse, at least I think so, because the sheer grossness of it becomes so much more apparent.  I think it’s actually the visual equivalent of the way wet peanut butter smells.  You know when you rinse out the peanut butter jar and leave it to sink in the soak and forget about it for a day or two?  Yeah.  Old Nutella looks like wet peanut butter smells.

I’m really not doing a great job of selling this recipe so far, am I?  Well here we go.  Of course I never want to use my Nutella once it separates, but I don’t want to throw it out because it would be wasteful, and so it usually sits in my cabinet until I move and I have a reason to throw it out because, who is really going to move old and semi-expired Nutella?  When you spread Nutella on stuff and eat it like that, the separation is obvious and kinda gross.  But in the brownie recipe, you have no idea how old your Nutella is, because it all gets mixed together.  It’s genius!!!

So you need:

1 and 1/4 cup Nutella (I used whatever was left in my jar)

2 eggs

1/2 cup flour (I used 1/4 all purpose and 1/4 wheat because I didn’t want it to be a total nutritional suck.  You could probably get away with all wheat and not know the difference, but I didn’t want to differ too much from the recipe the first time I made it.)

*I also added about 2 tbsp plain yogurt, because the batter seemed a little thick, but this is totally optional.

Bake for 20ish minutes in a greased 8×8 pan at 350 degrees.  Let cool (optional) and enjoy!!