“But what got me, in regards to these brownies, was the smell.  Of course a coffee shop will smell divine.  Obviously.  But this place has boards up at the ceiling with the neatest handwriting you’ve ever seen spelling out at least a hundred different beans.  Imagine that much coffee in one place.  Imagine the density of the aroma, the overpowering fragrance of a metric fuck ton of coffee in a small, old ground floor room of a small, old building.  Imagine that.  That is what these brownies taste like.

Like the smell of McNulty’s; like the coded chatter of baseball scores that I have never bothered to understand but have listened to all the same; like the repetitive motion of tape on bags, tape on bags, tape on bags; like coming into the shop off of pretty, tree-lined Christopher Street and joining the reverent queue around the tea jars; like the whiteboards crammed with names of more coffee than you can actually imagine.  They taste, essentially, like the earliest memories I have of New York City.  Am I being melodramatic?  Are you rolling your eyes at me?  Then why don’t you just go and make these lovely little things, read this post again, and see who’s scoffing now.”

I talk a lot about the emotional impact of a brownie that is probably an inch by an inch, but beyond that, it is a really good recipe.  So you should probably try it.