Brazilians have lots of little sweets - cocada, brigadeiro, beijinhos de coco, doce de leite, and so many more. Many of them (or, at least, the ones my Brazilian boyfriend has introduced me to) involve sweetened condensed milk and take about ten to fifteen minutes to make.

Brigaderio's no exception. Sweet little balls of slighty caramel, chocolatey goodness, typically rolled in balls, and rolled in sprinkles. It's not unlike a slacker fudgey truffle, with only three (or four) ingredients: a 14oz can of sweetened condensed milk, 3 Tbs of cocoa powder, 1-2 Tbs of butter, and (optionally) up to 1 tsp of vanilla, which are cooked over medium heat until it all comes together and gets thick, about 10 minutes (constantly stirring).

Normally, at that point, you pour it into a bowl, let it cool 30-60 minutes, and butter your hands to make it into balls, and roll the balls into chocolate sprinkles. I made this batch at 3 am, while finishing up laundry, so I didn't hang out long enough to roll it and just spread it out like I would fudge and shook sprinkles onto half of it. (Totally not traditional, but what can I say? It was 3 am, and I was tired!)

Incidentally, beijinhos de coco is essentially the same thing, but instead of 3 Tbs of cocoa powder, you use 4 Tbs of sweetened dried coconut that you add after 15-20 minutes (instead of immediately), and instead of rolling it in chocolate sprinkles, you roll it in more sweetened dried coconut. Traditionally, you also press a whole clove into the top of a beijinho de coco (but it's entirely for decoration so you don't haaaaaaaaaave to).

The name by itself suggests that this will be decadent. Triple chocolate (unsweetened, semi-sweet two ways, and white). Irish cream. Mmm. And if that didn't suggest a rich experience: it's very nearly sugarless, and has a wee bit of coffee liqueur to enrich the chocolate flavor.

It's enough that a tiny slice is almost too much.

To back this up a bit... this all started because my mom was having her 29th birthday for the 29th time (give or take a few years). With all the fruit cakes, fruit breads, fruit crisps/crumbles, and spice/nut cakes I've been baking this fall, she's been clamoring for something rich, decadent, and chocolate. And, well, it was her birthday, and who am I to deny her the one thing she's been wanting to eat?

So, I whipped out my cookbooks. I scoured through the recipes, looking for something that would give me a dense, intense chocolate cake, when finally I stumbled upon the Double Down Chocolate Cakes in my chocolate cookbook (Marcel Desaulniers' Celebrate with Chocolate).

The recipe was nearly perfect - very little flour (making it dense), very chocolatey, the sweet addition of Irish cream (one of my mom's favorite liqueurs). But, of course, there was a catch: the book calls for 16 mini pans, which beyond the fact that I don't have any mini-pans (let alone 16 of them), how unfun is it to have a birthday cake that's in 16 pieces? Almost defeats having a homemade birthday cake, if you want it pre-sliced, you may as well go out. So, I used a standard cake pan. Normally, that'd be an 8" round, but I couldn't find mine, so I used the 9" springform round. Needless to say, I have no clue how long it should be baked like this, but mine was in the oven about a half hour.


Anyway, come the birthday dinner, we had already partaken in a bottle of excellent Pinot Noir, some smoked rib roast, roasted garlic mashed potatoes, and green beans. These short bits of chocolate were enough to send us all into chocolate heaven.

Incidentally, the cake was significantly better the second day, so if you're planning on making this for a special event, I recommend baking it the night before and letting it hang out in the fridge - you can do the decorating that day, if you want.

These brownies are so yummy, it's not even funny.

The secret, of course, is the great brownie recipe that it starts off with!

But really, this was basically my grandmother's Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte with a single-layer, brownie base rather than the multi-layer cake base she used, and made slacker style with a can of cherries, instead of hand pitted/sliced cherries. Shhh, don't tell her that I shared her secret recipe!