Is it December 8 or January 22?

National Brownie Day is December 8. January 22 belongs to National Blonde Brownie Day, which is for blondies and is a separate observance.

Why does Brownie Day keep turning up in Girl Scout books?

Because the phrase turns up far more often outside the kitchen. HathiTrust returns 205 volumes for Brownie Day and the ones at the head of the list are children's camp directories and a 1956 Girl Scouts leadership manual, against only two volumes for National Brownie Day.

What is a Bangor brownie?

It is the name the earliest chocolate brownie recipes were printed under. A Chicago charity cookbook headed its 1904 recipe Bangor Brownies, and the Walter M. Lowney Co. was still using the name in 1907.

National Brownie Day

Next celebratedTuesday, December 8, 2026

National Brownie Day is a good excuse to heat the oven for the least fussy chocolate thing you can bake. Get a tray in, and let the house settle for itself whether it wants them fudgy or cakey.

See how to celebrate

Countdown to the day

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Last updated September 7, 2026 · by the Holiday Calendar TeamHave an update or spot an error?

YEARLY DATEDecember 8

OBSERVED INUnited States

CATEGORYFood

SUBCATEGORYBaking

ORIGIN

Community Origin

FOUNDING ENTITY

Not documented

FIRST OBSERVED

Not documented

HOW THE HOLIDAY CAME TO BE

The brownie has a paper trail. Its day does not.

No founder, sponsor or establishing record for National Brownie Day has been located. The phrase turns up in only two volumes in HathiTrust's full-text index, consecutive 2007 and 2008 issues of one trade serial, so the day is recent in print however old the recipe under it is.

+ Know the story? Submit a founder Help us complete this holiday

INTRO

A Chicago cookbook named the brownie after Maine

Open Fannie Farmer's 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book at page 424 and there is a recipe called Brownies with no chocolate in it. Molasses does the work, a cup of pecan meat goes in, and each little cake is baked in its own tin with half a pecan set on top. Anyone reaching for that page expecting the modern bar is about to have a strange afternoon.

The oldest chocolate brownie recipe traced for this page is eight years younger, and it is not from Boston. The Service Club of Chicago put it in a charity cookbook copyrighted in 1904, under the heading BANGOR BROWNIES. Melted chocolate, plenty of butter and sugar, and only half a cup of pastry flour to hold the whole thing together.

Chicago is the city whose grandest hotel says it invented the brownie for the 1893 world's fair. Its own club printed the recipe under the name of a city in Maine, and the argument has never been settled.

ORIGINS

Brownie Day history

CHAPTER 01

The first Brownies were not brownies

Farmer's 1896 first edition files Brownies in the cake chapter, sitting between Cup Cake and Ribbon Cake. The ingredients are butter, powdered sugar, Porto Rico molasses, an egg, bread flour and pecans, and the instruction is to bake them in small shallow fancy cake tins and garnish each one with half a pecan. Nothing with chocolate in it turns up under that name anywhere else in the book.

CHAPTER 02

Chicago printed it and Maine got the credit

The Service Club of Chicago sold its cookbook for a dollar and gave the money to charity. Tucked in among the pralines and the glace nuts is BANGOR BROWNIES, and it is the bar as we know it now: melted chocolate, half a cup of butter and a cup of sugar, with half a cup of pastry flour asked to carry all of it.

No cookbook read here explains why a Chicago club sent a Chicago recipe to Maine for its name. It stuck anyway. Walter M. Lowney's chocolate company reprinted it in 1907, four pages before its own house-brand Lowney's Brownies.

CHAPTER 03

One book, two recipes, sixteen pages apart

Farmer's book caught up in stages rather than all at once. The 1905 printing tucked a chocolate Brownies into the Addenda at the back, baked in a seven-inch square pan and cut into strips, while the molasses original stayed where it had always been. By the 1910 edition both sat in the body of the book, one among the cookies and one among the cakes, and the index printed the single name against two page numbers.

CHAPTER 04

The day came a great deal later

The dish left a thick paper trail and the observance left almost none. Nobody who started it is on record, and the phrase reaches print in only two indexed volumes, both from the late 2000s. What it does have is a December 8 that bakeries and food brands now work to.

TIMELINE

Timeline

Brownies without chocolate

Fannie Farmer's first edition files a recipe called Brownies in its cake chapter, on page 424, built on Porto Rico molasses and pecans rather than on chocolate.

The Chicago recipe with a Maine name

The Service Club of Chicago copyrights a charity cookbook containing BANGOR BROWNIES: butter, sugar, two eggs, two squares of Baker's chocolate and half a cup of pastry flour, baked fifteen minutes.

Farmer adds a second Brownies

The 1905 printing of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book carries a chocolate Brownies in its Addenda, lined into a seven-inch square pan with paraffine paper and cut in strips, while the molasses one keeps its old page.

A chocolate company adopts the name

Maria Willett Howard's Lowney's Cook Book, published by the Walter M. Lowney Co. of Boston, prints Bangor Brownies four pages before the firm's own Lowney's Brownies.

The day reaches print

The phrase National Brownie Day appears in HathiTrust's full-text index for the first time, in a trade serial, more than a century after the earliest recipe on this timeline.

GOOD TO KNOW

Surprising facts about National Brownie Day

Sears sold Brownie suits, a Brownie bicycle seat and a Brownie gun

The word was a marketing craze before it was a dessert. Sears, Roebuck's Spring 1897 Consumers Guide lists Brownies among the packaged crackers and wafers, and also advertises Brownie suits for boys aged four to fourteen, a Brownie child's seat for a bicycle and a Brownie gun. They are all the style this season, the catalogue says of the suits.

In 1900 a newspaper advertising chocolate Brownies meant chocolates

A Sacramento confectioner ran notices in the Placer Herald and the Placer County Leader announcing that the Brownies are in town and they are chocolate Brownies, the best eating chocolates out. Boxed sweets, not a baked bar. Every hit for the phrase in California papers that decade is that advertisement or a children's drawing contest.

The little sprites everything was named after

Palmer Cox's The Brownies: Their Book, from The Century Co., opens by calling them imaginary little sprites who work and sport while weary households sleep and never allow themselves to be seen by mortal eyes. Its chapters include The Brownies on Bicycles and The Brownies at Lawn-tennis. Whether the cake took its name from them is still an open question.

A California paper did not print a brownie recipe until 1919

The first hit in that newspaper collection that is unmistakably the dessert is in the Long Beach Telegram of 5 September 1919, page 11, which opens by telling the reader to cut in squares or oblong and remove from pan. Its opening quantities match Farmer's.

BY THE NUMBERS

National Brownie Day by the Numbers

86: Library volumes printing Bangor Brownies
14c: Sears price for a pound of Brownies, 1897
248%: Sugar against flour, King Arthur fudge brownie
0: Federal Register documents naming the day

WHY THIS DAY MATTERS

Why We Love National Brownie Day

Crust

Warm the sugar into the butter and the crust makes itself.

The thin crackly sheet on a good brownie is not luck. King Arthur Baking explains that partially melting the sugar into the fat causes it to rise to the top of the batter and dry out while the brownie bakes, which is why so many recipes ask you to warm the two together before anything else goes in.

Choice

Bakers now publish their formulas as ratios

Chewy against cakey is a question of proportion rather than taste, and the proportions are published. King Arthur sets six of its own brownie formulas against flour at 100 percent, so the differences are visible before the oven is on: its chewy brownie runs sugar all the way to 331 percent and drops melted chocolate entirely.

Trade

December 8 is now a working date in food

The day now shows up well outside holiday listings. TODAY.com covered it in 2023 and named the brands running offers on the day, among them Cheryl's Cookies, Dylan's Candy Bar, Fairytale Brownies, Greyston Bakery and Insomnia Cookies.

The more flour, the cakier a brownie will be; less flour leads to a fudgier brownie with a more compact crumb.

Rossi AnastopouloKing Arthur Baking

MYTH VS FACT

Common Misconceptions

The myth

The Palmer House invented the brownie in 1893, and the record shows it.

The truth

The hotel's own page is three sentences long. It names Bertha Palmer and the 1893 Columbian Exposition but no pastry chef, no menu and no document, and the one piece of support it offers is that the first American reference to the word appears in an 1898 Sears Roebuck catalogue. A printed Brownies recipe from 1896 and a Sears listing from the spring of 1897 both come earlier. None of that disproves the hotel's date either.

The myth

Fudgy brownies are fudgy because they contain more butter.

The truth

In King Arthur Baking's own published formulas the fat is the same. Set against flour at 100 percent, its fudge brownie carries 126 percent butter and oil and its cakey brownie 125 percent, and both carry identical sugar. What separates them is the eggs, 111 percent against 139 percent, and the added liquid: none in the fudgy one, 63 percent in the cakey one.

GET INVOLVED

How to Celebrate National Brownie Day

Bake the 1904 recipe as it was written

Cream half a cup of butter with a cup of sugar, add two squares of melted chocolate, two eggs, half a cup of pastry flour and half a cup of chopped walnuts, then spread it on a tin and bake fifteen minutes in a moderate oven. The Service Club of Chicago printed it in 1904 and it needs no translation.

DECIDE

Decide which brownie you actually want

Pick the texture before you pick the recipe. Fewer eggs and no added liquid give you the dense fudgy pan; more eggs and a little added liquid push it toward cake.

WARM

Warm the sugar and butter first

If the crackly top is the part you care about, melt the sugar into the fat before the eggs and flour go in. It is the one step that separates a shiny brownie from a matte one.

CUT

Cut the pan the old way

Line the tin, turn the whole slab out while it is still warm, peel the paper off and cut it with a sharp knife. Farmer's 1910 printing warns that ignoring the order leaves the paper clinging to the cake and the pieces impossible to shape.

ARGUE

Argue about Bangor

The oldest chocolate recipes carry a Maine city's name and came off presses in Chicago and Boston. None of those cookbooks says why, which makes it a good thing to put to the table while the pan cools.

Test your knowledge

How well do you know National Brownie Day?

1 / 8

What is in the Brownies recipe printed in Fannie Farmer's 1896 first edition?

Answer

No. It is not a public holiday, the Federal Register carries no document naming it, and no founder or establishing record was located in the indexes searched.