The quest for the perfect chocolate brownie

I have been fearlessly checking out chocolate brownies - for the good of the blog you understand! Now for me the perfect brownie has to have the correct cakey squidgeness, supremely good chocolaty taste and must not be adulterated by unnecessary extras. No chilli, no coconut strands and no nuts. The key word here is chocolate. Now to be honest I haven't tried a huge amount of brownies but I have reached a couple of initial conclusions.

The little individual ones from Gü are exceedingly good (or Güud, as they'd say!) and Waitrose do a fine version also. I had a lovely brownie once in Leon once but haven't seen them there again. I went in search of apparently ‘the best chocolate brownie ever’ according to one of the food magazines, which is made by Cocoa Loco but I wasn't too impressed. I just thought it wasn't being true to the inherent purity of a chocolate brownie - it had superfluous ingredients in it. I even had an extremely disappointing one at a nameless place that seemed to not even have real chocolate in it at all.

So far, after a far from exhaustive search my favourite chocolate brownie is the near-perfect specimen sold at Benugo. I appreciate there aren't that many Benugo outlets outside of Old Street and Clerkenwell (formed as a Pret beater by brothers Ben and Hugo!) but fortunately they are quite popular as in house coffee/snack concessions in some large forward thinking companies, so you may be able to track them down there.

I don’t think my quest is over yet; I am sure there are other gorgeous hunks of chocolate brownies out there, feel free to throw me a few crumbs and tell me where my search should lead me to next.

Any suggestions gratefully received.