Marco.org

squashed:

If I stir a cup of espresso into my brownie batter, what will happen? Carolyn has a paper due tomorrow.

Depends on how much you mean by “a cup”.

A 1.5-ounce shot of espresso has about 77mg of caffeine. By comparison, an average 8-ounce cup of regular drip coffee has about 145mg. But drip coffee varies a lot depending on what you make and how you make it. Starbucks’ 8-ounce “short” size, for example, is 180mg — but most people don’t know that size exists, so they get the 12-ounce, 260mg “tall” size that Starbucks gives you if you ask for a “small”. Then they wonder why it hits them so hard and why they get addicted to tremendous coffee drinks with stupid names from Starbucks and why they can’t sleep well at night which makes them get more coffee the next day to stay awake. (And that’s only if they order the small.)

Anyway, if you mean 1 cup for cooking purposes, that’s 8 ounces of espresso, which is about 410mg of caffeine. I’ll make some assumptions:

• One person probably isn’t eating the entire batch of brownies. One person will eat, at most, half of the batch.
• Caffeine content isn’t reduced by baking. (I actually have no idea about this.)

So each of you is likely to consume, at most, 205mg of caffeine, or about as much as one and a half cups of coffee.

That’s enough caffeine to keep most people awake for a while, but it certainly isn’t going to cause any extreme effects, although I’m not sure I’d recommend eating half of the brownies in one night.