On a cold December evening, swing open the door at brownieDr in Berkley. The room will answer with warmth, the kind that fogs your glasses and hushes the day. A tray of dark-chocolate squares cools beneath ribbons of caramel; another carries a crown of toasted coconut, a nod to the German Chocolate cake her husband loves, and her customers now chase in brownie form.
If law builds on precedent, consider this Exhibit A: a life can change course, and still arrive exactly where it was meant to go.
For 29 years, Chanille Carswell was a litigator, working long hours and late nights, and giving it every ounce of energy she had, until her success began to feel like exhaustion in disguise. Baking became the quiet counterweight. “I could get in there, put on headphones, listen to a book, and just…get lost,” she says. “It was my stress reliever. My quiet place.” Baking was the quiet counterweight. “I could get in there, put on headphones, listen to a book, and just…get lost,” she says. “It was my stress reliever. My quiet place.”
Then the world stopped. For the first thirty days of COVID, client work paused, and the silence expanded like a blank page. Chanille filled it with butter and research: she dusted off cookbooks, taught herself French pastries, and, almost as a dare, made brownies from scratch; she gave them away to family and friends. People thanked her—and then they asked for more. In a year crowded with fear, that small square felt simple and pure and…right.
“I was working from home—my office is across the hall from my bedroom,” she says. “That was the longest walk every day to that computer to sit down and work.” And then the counter-truth: “I would just run downstairs at the end of each week, so excited. I’d be thinking about it all week, planning and researching every free moment.” The lightbulb followed: this was the thing that made her happiest.
So she built a proof of concept, the way a good attorney builds a case: research, iteration, evidence. She developed baseline recipes. She tested sizes (“some were the size of a baby’s head”), equipment, and presentation: she decorated individual squares like cupcakes, filling and frosting them as feature desserts. She chased flavors that carried memory: German Chocolate. Lemon Meringue. Dutch Apple Pie. “Nostalgia was my theme,” she says. “Largely Southern flavors I grew up with, reimagined as brownies.”
Not everything translated. The early pecan-pie brownie “was a mushy, horrible mess,” she laughs. But like any stubborn brief, it became persuasive in revision. At least five rounds later (maybe more), she had what’s now a best-seller: a glossy caramel-pecan crown over a plush chocolate base.
In February 2022, she and her husband lugged trays to a pop-up at Great Lakes Crossing for three weekends, virtually selling out each time. For Chanille, the verdict was clear. She applied to TechTown Detroit’s Retail Boot Camp to refine her operations, and got help writing a business plan from the Michigan Black Business Association. Her sister stepped in to build the site and logo and take social media off her plate because, as Chanille puts it with a grin, “I was trying to do social media and it was pathetic. It was pitiful. I’m too old to really know how to do that.” Her mother came out of a twenty-year retirement to work the front. Her dad brings flowers, weeds the drive, fixes what needs fixing. It’s as if the whole family heard the gavel, and rose with her.
Even a voice from further back hangs out in the kitchen: Chanille’s paternal grandmother in Mississippi. She was the effortless kind of cook who measured by feel, and fed with love. “I didn’t inherit her recipes,” Chanille says, “but I think about her all the time.”
Like any savvy entrepreneur, Chanille knows delight begins with trust. brownieDr is built on ingredients and consistency. She chose dark chocolate (“it’s rich but not bitter”) keeps recipes clean and replicable (“caramel is sugar, butter, cream—I make it”), and aims for Snickers-level reliability, but with the elegance and depth of a dessert made by hand. “If you loved it once, you should love it again,” she says. “That’s part of the brand.”
Scaling is its own challenge. “Staffing has been the hardest,” she admits. “If I want to grow, I have to let go.” On the day we spoke, her first baker had just started; she was able to replicate a house recipe perfectly. It’s a step toward Chanille’s long-range plan: a franchise model designed to run itself, so she can someday indulge her love of traveling. “I don’t need everyone to know my name,” she says. “I want to build something that sustains, and be comfortable enough to be present in my life.”
Service opened the door to law—Chanille began as a public defender—and service threads through her plans for brownieDr. She plans to create roles for people with learning disabilities when capacity allows. “Finding ways to give back matters to me,” she says.
But her brownies themselves give back to her customers. She shares a memory at Eastern Market, during All Things Detroit: a man bought a German Chocolate brownie and wandered off. Fifteen minutes later he returned, walked straight to the booth, and hugged her. “He said, ‘Thank you, ’cause this brownie tastes exactly like the German chocolate cake my mother used to make.’ That was probably the most…” She swallows. “I was so touched.”
December at brownieDr arrives like a ready-made memory: warm, celebratory, and full of deliciousness. This year’s holiday lineup features a Peppermint Mocha frosted brownie that melts like cocoa by a fire, Peppermint Crunch brownie cookies with a cool snap and festive shimmer, and a Sweet Potato Blondie infused with the cozy spices of home. Each is a small permission slip, not just for the holiday season but for every day: choose joy.
“That’s our slogan,” Chanille says simply. “‘Choose joy.’ There’s a lot of serious in the world, and it’s not going anywhere. But everybody has to find peace and joy where they can. If our desserts can be that bright spot, even for a moment, I’m grateful.”
Precedent established: when the world is heavy, we can still practice joy, square by square…until joy becomes the law of the land.
brownieDr is at 2752 Coolidge in Berkley. Visit brownieDr.com or call (313) 356-6330
“Nostalgia was my theme: largely Southern flavors I grew up with, reimagined as brownies.”
“If you loved it once, you should love it again. That’s part of the brand.”