Chess Board Brownies Recipe + 12 tips to make them easy

A long time ago, one of my neighbor girls (the daughters I never had) and I made chess board brownies. We’d been wildly in love with chocolate molds and made several different kinds. But our crowning achievement was the brownies, and of course the chess pieces on top were molded chocolate. We had a ton of fun, and I’ve remembered it all these years with serious fondness.

I was planning to make some in honor of the World Chess Candidates Tournament that was held in Spain June/July of 2022. Originally, I was going to make my famous chocolate chip cookies, but this won out!

I don’t remember the chess board brownies or the chocolates being that difficult back then, but I guess this time around I was just destined to find every possible problem. However, I eventually DID figure some of them out, and I can share those solutions in case you run into any of them too.

Chess Board Brownies Tips

I’ll give you tips as we go along, but before we begin, here’s probably the most important chess board brownies tip of all:

Find out exactly what you need, and gather everything up before you start.

For instance, don’t just be pretty sure you’ve got a 1 1/2″ wide ruler somewhere in the house. It might not be in that junk drawer anymore. In fact, your husband may tell you that it broke and he threw it away around 12 years ago! Oops. Plan B.

Chess Board Brownie Recipes

Here are the recipes for each of the parts of our chess board brownies. I used 12×12 inch pans so the brownies and blondies come out a little shorter than they would otherwise. Now that I’ve found SugarSpunRun.com, I’m going to look there first for my dessert recipes. I love it!

• Brownies
• Blondies
• Chocolate for Molds

In reality, chess board brownies are pretty simple. You make a batch of brownies where you can get at least 32 good squares, and an additional batch of 32 blondies. Then you make two sets of white and two sets of black chess pieces in molds with melted/tempered chocolate.

If you’re completely comfortable with each of those things, you don’t need to read any further. 🙂 But if you want some potentially humorous warnings and tips, then read on!

Making the Brownies

First, make the brownies. I actually used a different recipe than the one I gave you above, and it wasn’t very good. Here were the ingredients, in the picture below.

Oops – it also called for two eggs.

What Went Wrong With the Brownies

Several things went wrong with the brownies. I made two batches and I didn’t like either one! The first batch was from the cookbook I got as a new bride and have used all my life. I guess I’d forgotten that the brownies weren’t very good. They were bitter and thin, and the recipe didn’t come close to making enough squares for our chess board brownies. Plus they crumbled like crazy!

When I started the second batch, I was in a hurry and didn’t check the online recipe for reviews, etc. It turned out to also be a small batch, and in addition, it called for chocolate chips on top. I figured that was ok, since I was not planning on the top showing.

Flip the brownies over and use the smooth bottom side for the chess board.

However, because the batch was so small, it was also thin, and the chocolate chips sank to the bottom and hardened. (ok, burned a bit too.) Not only did that not taste spectacular, it made it difficult to cut. You can see in these pictures the dark scorched places.

As you can see, I didn’t have the 1 1/2 inch wide ruler I thought I had. (Planning ahead would have been the thing to do here.) But since I was actually in the middle of the brownies, I had to go down to the work bench and grab a small piece of trim – wash it – and use that instead.

Making the Blondies

I learned my lesson with the hurried and unplanned brownies, so took my time with the blondies and found a wonderful recipe! These are soft and delicious, and perfectly easy to cut. Here are the steps for the blondie part of our chess board brownies.

Line your baking pan with parchment paper. This makes it SO easy to clean. Run your fingernail along the edges to get them nice and sharp, and fold the corners. That way you don’t get too many wrinkles in your final product

The recipe calls for melted butter and an extra egg yolk, which is undoubtedly what helps make them so soft.

Mix the dry ingredients together first.

Then the wet ingredients in a separate bowl.

Pour the dry into the wet in small batches, and mix thoroughly.

Bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes on the top rack, then cool before turning the blondies upside down on a cutting board. Use a guide to cut 1 1/2″ or 2″ squares – whatever will work best with the chocolate molds you have.

What Went Wrong with the Blondies

Actually, the only thing that went a little wrong was the cutting, and that was my fault, not theirs! This was a worse problem with the brownies though. Because I wasn’t really careful about where I was lining up my “ruler,” the squares weren’t all exactly the same size. Some were pretty small, which is a little bit of a problem in the next step.

Also I broke some of the corners off, which brings us to our next tip.

Always run your cutter in only one direction, and keep a steady speed. Going back and forth might put extra stress on your brownies and break them.

Creating the Chess Board for Our Chess Board Brownies

Now that your brownies and blondies are cut into squares, you’re going to put them into a chess board. Either the brownies or blondies might be a little taller than the other, so you might need to trim them a bit.

Be sure to trim off the bottoms of the squares, so the top pieces all look the same.

A chess board is 8 by 8 squares. You can see in the picture below, that my board isn’t perfectly square. That’s because not all the squares are exactly the same size. I kept telling myself these are just brownies – no need to freak out, and they’ll taste just as fabulous!

Making the Chocolates

And now we come to the Everything Went Wrong section. As I mentioned, I don’t remember having any trouble the first time I did this, but I just couldn’t get these chocolate chess pieces right!

I started out with some old candy melts. I’m pretty sure they were left over from when my neighbor and I made the original chess board brownies, back in 2016. But there was no expiration date, and they looked and tasted good, so I went ahead.

I had two big plastic chess piece molds, which did not have the whole set on one tray. I’d have to make two trays at a time, and do several batches, which was kind of a pain and takes quite a bit longer. But the pieces were nice and big.

What Went Wrong with the Chocolates – Part 1

So I started out. I’m admitting right now that this first round was all my own fault, as I didn’t do any research at all. I thought I could rely on my memory from long ago, and go commando. NOT. And let this be a warning to all!

Anyway, I got out a double boiler (we don’t actually own a microwave,) and started boiling some water. When it just started to boil, I took it off the heat and dumped in the candy melts. They immediately started clumping up. It didn’t matter how long I stirred, they never melted.

I just ended up with a big pan full of clotted chocolate. So I added some butter and milk to smooth it out. It worked, and the chocolate was beautiful!

I love using these squeeze bottles instead of pastry bags. They’re so easy and not messy at all.

I say these bottles aren’t messy, but that’s when you put them together properly! I apparently didn’t, and got chocolate all over the mold, the counter, and myself. Not pretty.

Make sure the top of the bottle is sitting completely level and flush in the neck ring.

See in the picture below how there’s a bit of the bottle top that isn’t flush with the ring edge? THAT’S why I had chocolate all over everywhere!

Do this, not that!

ANYway, I put the chocolate in the molds, and put them in the refrigerator. The chocolate never set up. I moved the molds to the freezer. No good. Obviously, all that monkeying I’d done ruined the ability of the chocolate to harden. Arg.

What I Did Wrong – Chess Board Brownies Lessons to Learn

Ok, I’ll spare you the details, but I finally did some research, and here’s a list of the things I did wrong.

• Water in the double boiler was WAY too hot!
• The top pan was still damp when I put the chocolate in.
• I used a wooden spoon.
• I put the lid on the double boiler to try to get the chocolate to smooth out.

And Here are Four Tips for Doing It Right

The water in the double boiler should be SIMMERING.

Not boiling. Simmering is when only a few bubbles from the bottom of the pan come up to the surface. It’s not close to a boil at all. See how there are only a few bubbles on the surface?

Everything needs to be COMPLETELY DRY! No water should ever come into contact with your chocolate. Water makes it seize up.

Don’t use a wooden spoon to stir, because it can transfer moisture to the chocolate.

Same with putting the lid on. It creates condensation and introduces water into your chocolate.

Chocolates Round 2

I was bugged. I thought it might be the molds, so I ordered some new silicone ones. Unfortunately, when they arrived, they were much smaller than my originals. So I had to do some hasty math recalculations and decided on 1 1/2″ squares rather than my original 2″.

I also thought maybe my melts were suspect, so I went and got some brand new ones.

I fixed the heat and moisture problems I had in round 1 and tried again.

The chocolate melted like a dream by following the above tips. Then I poured it into the squeeze bottles and put it in the new molds.

Only fill the molds about 3/4 full. When you gently tap them against the counter, the chocolate will fill in, and you can top up if necessary. However, you want to be sure to keep the level below the edge so you can put them together easily when they come out.

Once you tap them down, you can tidy up any spills. I tried using a flat baker’s smoother, but it made a huge mess. So I ended up just washing my hands well and using my fingers. I dried them on a paper towel between wipes. (My fingers, that is!)

You can also see below how some of the molds are overfilled. The pieces would have rounded backs when they came out, which would be really hard to join to their opposite halves later. So I wiped out some of the chocolate in those too.

What Went Wrong This Time.

Taking the chocolates out of the molds was tedious and a lot of them broke! (Don’t worry – I never use this ugly pan for actual cooking!) 🙂

More Chess Board Brownies Chocolate Research

Back to the drawing board. Lots of chocolate molders online mentioned “tempering” so I tried that next.

New chocolate.

Heated up 2/3 of the chocolate to 115 degrees, then removed from heat and added the remainder to cool it down.

Stirred like crazy while it cooled off to 84 degrees. They recommend an ice water bath for this, but I was terrified of getting any water in it, so I set the pan on an ice pack instead. That brought the temperature down just fine.

Then back on the double boiler to warm to 90 degrees. Poured into the molds and popped into the fridge to cool.

But alas – this batch broke even more than the last, and it didn’t set up as well either! I used more melted chocolate to stick the salvageable pieces (from both batches) together. But they were melting as I worked, even though I tried to keep my fingers and the chocolates cool. Granted, it was warm in here in our PNW summer with no air conditioning, but I wouldn’t have expected it to melt like that. Plus the other batch didn’t …

The Final Chess Board Brownies with Chocolate Chess Pieces

Notwithstanding the wonkiness of the whole undertaking, I’m reasonably happy with my chess board brownies. The pieces are still a little small for the board, but I think we can suffer through!

And no matter what size, it’s a fun idea!

And it’ll be great to eat while celebrating the World Chess candidates, or watching Queen’s Gambit! Or just hanging around with our neighbors enjoying the summer.

Whew – that was a long one! If you have any chocolate mold advice, I’d love to hear it. Drop a Comment below, or write me at barbara@mantelandtable.com any time. Thanks so much for being here, and if you’re new, I’m so happy to have you, and I want you to know that my posts aren’t usually this long! 🙂

Shop the Chess Board Brownies Post

Click on the pictures below for links to the pieces I mentioned in this post. If something’s not available, I chose a similar replacement.

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• Chocolate Squeeze Bottle
• Candy Melts
• 12 x 12 Baking Pan
• My Favorite Vanilla
• Pizza Cutter
• Double Boiler
• Spatula
• Chocolate Molds – Brown Silicone, Small Pieces (maybe you’ll have better luck with them.)
• Chocolate Molds – Clear Plastic, Larger Pieces
• Candy Thermometer
• 2″ Wide Ruler

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