If you want fudge, make real fudge, which is delicious. Don’t make an under-baked cake. 
Anyway, brownies aren’t cake, even the crispy delicious fully-baked type. They are denser and drier. Something between a cake and a cookie.
To me it is:
Cake → Muffin → Brownie → Cookie → → → Fudge.
My muffins are significantly less sweet than cake , which isn’t as sweet as brownies.
Muffins have a similar texture and moisture level to cake, though.
Cake might be less sweet but you have the all sugar frosting that goes with it which puts it in very sweet territory for me.
I think you misread my comment. Muffins aren’t as sweet as cake. At least, not when i make them.
No matter what the other choices, they must be undercooked by a few minutes
My experience is all cakes have frosting. I can’t think of a cake without frosting (except cheesecake which is not really a cake IMO).
Some, not all, muffins have frosting. E.g. blueberry muffins for breakfast don’t have frosting.
Few brownies have frosting (and they really don’t need it). Personally, I will not eat a brownie if it has frosting. Too much.
Cookies almost never have frosting (and certainly do not need it).
Fudge is candy and not a baked good so…in a different category in my mind.
The reason I asked about frosting: my husband gives me grief because I don’t frost brownies. The only time I’ve seen them frosted is in packages of cheap store-bought or vending machine brownies. The closest I come to frosting is serving them with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a squirt of chocolate syrup.
He’s wrong about this, but he’s a good spouse otherwise.
My husband makes a spice cake in a mold that looks like a dragon curled around its egg. We sometimes dust it with powdered sugar to set off the details, but never actually frost it. When i make a layer cake i do use frosting.
If you frost a muffin you may as well just call it a cupcake. Many commercial muffins are as sweet as cake, which annoys me, because i think of muffins as part of the main meal, not dessert, and i don’t want them sweet. (I also don’t eat most commercial pie, because it’s almost always too sweet.)
I think of brownies as the most common representative of the “bar cookie” family. So they are firmly between cookies and cakes. I don’t like other under-baked cookies, either. Obviously, many people aren’t as turned off by gooey sticky foods as i am. I find it a very unpleasant texture. And sometimes the gooey ones even taste of undercooked flour, which is unpleasant in its own right. When someone brings brownies to an event, i always look at them before deciding if it’s worth trying. Frosted? Nope. Gooey? Nope. I’m pretty much a pastry snob.
non-Brownie baking rambles
(Delightfully, i seem to have fallen in with some excellent bakers, though. One woman brought a super homemade blueberry cheesecake to an event i attended last night. Whole blueberries in the cake really lighten it. She brought homemade puff-pastry goodies last week. And one of my fellow Tuesday-night dancers has been experimenting with Bundt cakes. They haven’t repeated a recipe yet. Most of them are excellent. And another guy often bakes shortbread or scones.)
I think historically, brownies used to really be bar cookies, and they have evolved into the gooey things so many people like, along with the rise of commercial cookies with humectants to keep them “moist”. I don’t eat those, either. (I mean, yes, homemade cookies fresh from the oven are soft, but they get crispy when they cool.) And some brownies from mixes taste like plastic and other additives, perhaps even additives to keep them moist, i dunno. It’s clearly a feature that much of the market demands, even at the expense of flavor.
My mom made the BEST brownies. They were in between cakey and fudgey. She’d make one pan with walnuts and one pan without. My preference is without. She would frost them with the most amazing frosting ever created. It was the kind you have to boil and if you let it go one second too long, it was ruined. It was like a layer of soft chocolate fudge.
I have to find her recipe and try to make them. I did try making the frosting once and didn’t have much luck.
I use a box mix. My favorites are Ghirardelli and Betty Crocker. I don’t frost them.The best way to eat them is when they’re still warm with butter on top. Yes, I said butter!
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No nuts. Nuts absolutely ruin any dessert they come into contact with. I will literally (not figuratively!) starve myself to death before I eat something sweet with nuts in it. The only possible exception is baklava but I would have to be damn hungry. I’ve made baklava a few times and pistachios are simply not welcome.
Mini chocolate chips are maybe acceptable. I prefer plain.
No frosting. That’s for cake or Christmas cookies.
Inside or edge piece are both desirable as both have their attractions (same philosophy applies to corn bread).
Box mix. Like you, if someone went to the trouble of putting all the ingredients pre-measured into a box for me, I’ll be all over that. Now that I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever made brownies from scratch. Cake and cookies, of course. But not brownies.
A week or two ago I went to bed around 10pm. I woke up the following morning to find a half-eaten pan of brownies on the stove. Apparently for a midnight snack one of my kids found a box of brownie mix in the cupboard and made it up and baked it – at 1130pm. 
If a worthwhile spouse wants frosted brownies, my advice is to make the frosting worthy in it’s own right, either as an accent or as a contrast. I still wouldn’t do it for myself, but either a made from scratch chocolate ganache (ideally super high cacao to give it a deeper chocolate flavor and less sweet) or an equally made from scratch cream cheese frosting.
But the above quote is correct, much frosting is crap, and full of the sort of stuff no one wants corrupting an otherwise delightful baked good.
“Snack cakes”** aren’t frosted - they depend on intense flavor/sweetness baked in, and sometimes they are iced - like this recipe, which I think is pretty good.
Same with pound/bundt cakes; I think they are more likely to be unfrosted than frosted, but they often are iced.
Though one might argue that icing is just a subcategory of frosting. I’d concede that point.
**Hmm, I think the commercial baked sweet industry might disagree. I’m pretty sure there are some kind of Hostess snack cakes on the market with frosting.
OK, this I could go with. Definitely…
< adds cream cheese to shopping list >
I also like unfrosted chocolate cake and cupcakes warm with butter!
Now, can anyone explain why the outside edges are so wonderful? They have the perfect, chewy texture compared to the center.
A cake doesn’t do that. The outside edge is the same as the middle.
Kroger Deli sells brownie bites that are too delicious. I rarely buy them because it’s hard to exercise any restraint.
https://www.kroger.com/p/bakery-fresh-brownie-bites/0001111064117?fulfillment=PICKUP