Grandma’s Butterscotch Brownies

Grandma’s Butterscotch Brownies are a classic bar cookie that are gooey and great with a big glass of milk. Add your favorite mix-ins, like chocolate chips or nuts, to personalize this easy, homemade dessert.

Growing up, my family and I spent every major holiday (Thanksgiving, Christmas and Easter) at my paternal grandparent’s home. I should add that they lived a couple of miles away from us. Their house sat on the main farm where my dad worked so we spent a lot of our days there but holidays were special times.

Grandma would do the majority of the cooking with everyone else bringing a covered dish to add to the already groaning table.

Barbara sat down with our grandma several years ago and recorded several of her recipes – some that were written on well-worn recipe cards and others that resided only in grandma’s head. She then put together the collection and gave each of us a copy.

Ingredients for Butterscotch Brownies

• Light brown sugar
• Shortening
• Eggs
• Flour
• Baking Powder
• Vanilla
• Chocolate Chips (optional)

These Butterscotch Brownies are one of the recipes in grandma’s collection; however, I cannot remember her making these for us. But if it’s one of grandma’s recipes, it is a winner in our books!

If you saw Grandma’s recipe above, it didn’t give step-by-step directions. So, I called upon my many years of 4-H training and put the brownies together like this…

I started with the “wet” ingredients.

Then I sifted together the dry ingredients and incorporated the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients.

Here’s what the completed dough looked like…

Then I baked it in a preheated 350 degree oven for 20-25 minutes. Since this was my first time baking this treat, I worried a bit about how long to leave it in so I left it in for 23 minutes…probably could have left it in for the full 25 and been just fine.

Because it had shortening in it, the brownies puffed up quite impressively while in the oven and then settled once cooled.

The insides were gooey, kind of like butterscotch – I think. They were quite good and my dad said that they tasted similar to what he remembered. So they were a success!

How to Make Grandma’s Butterscotch Brownies

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Cream together brown sugar and shortening. Add eggs and mix well. Add vanilla and mix. Sift together flour and baking powder. Slowly add dry ingredients to wet ingredients and mix well. Spread into greased 9×13 pan. Bake 20-25 minutes.