Chocolate plus Dulce de Leche

I fell in love with dulce de leche last year in Chile. Lito and I spent about two months zipping around South America like we owned the place. On one fantastic occasion, our darling friend Chacha introduced us to crepes with dulce de leche, which she called pancake (pronounced pan-que-que, or something like that).

So when another amazing foodie friend forwarded me the recipe for David Lebovitz's dulce de leche brownie, how could I resist? How?

Especially when it turned out that making dulce de leche was seriously easy.

Here's what you need:

*1 can of sweetened condensed milk

*kosher salt or coarsely ground salt if you have a fancy grinder

Here's what you do:

*Pour the sweetened condensed milk into a glass pie plate, or another shallow baking dish that can fit inside another baking dish.

*Put the pie plate in the other baking dish (I used a jelly roll pan), and fill it with warm water, so your pie plate is a little island of sweet joy in the center.

*Sprinkle the milk with a little salt. I probably used 1/4 t, max. I think this is where the pros say "salt to taste," then cover the pie plate with aluminum foil.

*Bake at 425 degrees for 75 to 90 minutes. Check on it a couple times to add more water if you need to.

*Once the sweetened condensed milk has turned goldeny brown, let it cool completely and then whisk it up. Eat it on a spoon, on toast, on ice cream (more on this later) and definitely swirl it in your brownies.

Something about this swirling makes me think alternately of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, ala, swimming in chocolate, and/or tree bark. Really delicious tree bark. And when you've got one really sweet thing that's brown and tan, well, then another sweet thing isn't really out of the question. Our new little pup bore enough of a resemblance, so we named her Brownie.

One more of the chocolate, just because

These brownies, as Lebovitz himself says, are truly better the next day. They're ridiculously rich and totally worth it.

Adapted from David Lebovitz, Living the Sweet Life in Paris