-To toast nuts, place on baking sheet in 325 degree oven for about 7-10 minutes, or until fragrant.
-I like to line the inside of the pan with foil for simple removal from the baking pan. It also makes cutting the brownies much easier.
-This recipe is easily adapted to omit the nuts. If you are leaving out the nuts, use 1 cup flour instead of 3/4 cups flour as stated in the recipe. If you do not increase the amount of flour used, the brownies will take a long time to set up and be very wet in the middle and overcooked along the edges. I always compensate if I omit nuts in a recipe such as this one, which calls for a large amount of nuts, by increasing the flour just a bit.
-Melting the butter and chocolate. I always do this on my gas stove. If you have a stove that you are able to turn down to a very low temperature, you will not need a double boiler. Simply put the pan on the stove and turn to low.
-Whenever I mix chocolate chips into a recipe, I throw the flour and other dry ingredients in at one time along with the chocolate chips to coat the chips with a bit of flour, this prevents the chocolate chips from sinking to the bottom of the brownie.
-If you want a tender brownie, without having it fall apart, the key is to not over mix. This includes the beating of eggs and sugar together. Mix just until incorporated.
-I love this cookbook from Amy's Bread, it is a collection of the sweet items they sell in the Bakery, along with fun stories about their customers, the history of how they came to sell certain items through trial and error, etc. Everything I've made out of this book I has been a ten on the yum scale.