Fruitcake-inspired Brownies

Are we making fruitcake? No! We're making brownies: pecans, walnuts, dates, nutmeg, baking powder, dried cherries, bittersweet chocolate, hazelnuts, candied orange bits, butter, flour, vanilla, cinnamon!

A happy holiday sight.

First step: mix a bunch of chocolate into a bunch of melted butter.

And stir.

Until it's smooth as pudding.

Dry ingredients ahoy! We like grating nutmeg on this little rasp but a fine Microplane-style grater works too.

If you don't have a proper sifter (or don't want to dig it out of the cabinet) just use a fine strainer to sift the dry ingredients and tap, tap, tap the side.

We went rogue and mixed the dried fruit bits with the flour mixture -- they were sticky, and this helped keep them from clinging together.

Nuts, are you ready? Are you toasted?

Yes!

Onward to wet ingredients -- starting with 5 eggs!

And a pile of lightly packed brown sugar.

James Ransom, the wonder photographer, captures the secret dance moves of vanilla.

Once the eggs and sugar are thick and pale (a good 4-5 minutes on high speed in the mixer), the cooled chocolate-butter elixir gets folded in.

A deft fold keeps the mix light and airy.

Keep on folding for the dry ingredients and nuts (except the pecans, which get to star on top of the brownies).

A paper towel, wax paper, the butter wrapper itself, or your fingers (if you want to get messy) -- all make good dish butterers.

Bring the batter!

And pecans to dot the top.

Doesn't look much like fruitcake, does it? Sneaky.

All the good surprises of fruitcake lurk inside, with none of the bad ones. Brilliant.