Other forms: brownies
A brownie is a dense square of baked chocolate cake. Chocolate brownies, a tray of brownies, warm brownie.
The whole point is that it is underbaked in the middle — a brownie cooked through becomes a chocolate cake, which is a different and lesser thing. Blondie is the version without cocoa. The Brownies, capitalised, is the junior section of the Guides in Britain. And in folklore a brownie is a small household spirit that does chores at night in exchange for milk. Note brownie points, meaning credit earned for doing something helpful.
1nounbrownieA dense square of baked chocolate cake.
“She baked a tray of chocolate brownies for the school fair.”
2nounsmallA small household spirit in folklore.
“The brownie in that story does the work and asks for milk.”
brownie is a cake, or a household spirit.
The cake is named simply for its colour, and first appears in American cookbooks in the 1890s. The folklore brownie is a separate and much older word, from the same brown, named for the creature's colour.
Middle English
broun
English
brown
English, today
brownie
From brown + ie. In folkloric sense, originally Scots -. For sense 7, compare with Dutch kabouter (“a very young female member of the scout movement”) (literally "gnome"). brown comes from Middle English broun. Middle English broun, from Old English brūn (“brown; dark; dusky”), from Proto-West Germanic brūn, from Proto-Germanic brūnaz, from Proto-Indo-European bʰerH-. a doublet of bruin. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA