These Passover-Friendly (and Gluten-Free!) Brownies Are Coconut Bliss

Although brownies aren't typically included in the canon of classically Jewish food, for Jake Cohen, they're integral to his Jewish identity. Cohen is a New York–based food writer and a serious entertainer; friendly dessert. pre-pandemic, he hosted communal Shabbat dinners for 100 people at a time. For a crowd-pleasing dinner, he'd serve sheet pan brownies—but found dinner guests were divided on them. "They fell into either Team Cakey or Team Fudgy," Cohen says. "I wanted to create a brownie that was going to please everyone."

And that's exactly what he did in his new cookbook, Jew-ish: Reinvented Recipes from a Modern Mensch. Using coconut flour instead of wheat flour, Cohen created a brownie with a consistency that's simultaneously tender and dense, while also keeping the brownies gluten-free and kosher for Passover.

Then, in an homage to the canned Manischewitz macaroons he grew up eating at his own family's Passover Seder, Cohen tops the coconut-flour brownies with a layer of well-salted coconut macaroon to yield an eye-catching hybrid dessert that's the best of all worlds: chewy, crunchy, and not too sweet.