As you know, Valentine’s Day is right around the corner. One of my fondest memories of the holiday, from when I was a little girl, is my Oma making a box of goodies for us that always contained a big brownie shaped like a heart.

It seemed like an obvious choice to make a brownie in honor of that memory. And I fully intended to make it heart shaped since she gave me her heart-shaped tins a month or two ago. Unfortunately, I misplaced the tins somewhere. I’m sure I put them somewhere so I could find them—I’m been planning to use them since she gave them to me. The hubbub of starting a new job this last week has scrambled my memory though. I had no problem finding the four-leaf-clover pan she gave me. I’m sure I’ll find the hearts when it’s time for St. Patrick’s Day. Or tomorrow.

They’re still Valentine’s Day brownies though because I use my other Grandma’s brownie recipe—only I modified it a little. She always frosts these brownies, but I chose to make them red velvet and gave them a cheesecake swirl.

What you need for Grandma Millie’s Brownies:

2 sticks (1 cup) of butter
2 tsp vanilla
2 cups sugar
10 Tbls cocoa
1 tsp salt
1½ cups flour
4 unbeaten eggs
1 cup nuts (optional—I did not include nuts)

My version of this recipe is very minimalist. Basically her instructions are to combine all of these things into a batter.

(Introducing the newest addition to the kitchen—a KitchenAid stand mixer!)

I creamed together the butter, vanilla, and sugar.

Then I added the cocoa and salt.

Because the batter was really dry at this point, I added the eggs.

The last thing I added was the flour.

In hindsight, I should have whisked together the flour, cocoa, and salt. I should have added the dry ingredients to the butter slowly and alternating with the eggs. I don’t think it would have changed the end result, but it may have been easier to combine all of the ingredients this way.

I almost forgot the red food coloring to make them red velvet brownies. I used a lot of food coloring. My tip is that you get the Wilton gel food color. It works a lot better. I thought I had some at home, but it was a couple years old and dried up. But it does work when it’s not dried up—it makes red frosting instead of pink. And it would have made these brownies an awesome red. Put in as much food color as you need to get the color you want.

Scoop the batter into a pan. I wanted to flip my brownie out of the pan so I lined it with parchment paper. But you don’t have to do that; you could just grease the pan.

After I put the batter in the pan, I worried that it still wouldn’t be red enough. So I dusted the top with red sprinkles. This is optional. And in the end I think it was unnecessary.