To create her Fat Witch brownies, Patricia Helding only uses seven ingredients: sugar, butter, eggs, unsweetened chocolate, unbleached flour, vanilla, and salt. And yet, something magical happens when they’re mixed together. Out of this alchemy come brownies that are rich, chocolaty, and simply irresistible. One bite is never enough.

Who has control when there are eight regular flavors to savor, from the original Fat Witch to the white chocolate Snow Witch? Watch out waistbands: Ms. Helding, 60, is hard at work at perfecting a milk chocolate version.

Then there are the special brownies. Each August, the Fat Witch bakery, located in Manhattan’s Chelsea Market, rolls out brownies with an African flavor to honor one of the primary sources of cacao beans.

This August, for the first time, Fat Witch will sell this year’s African-inspired treat, the Double Chocolate Witch, online. Proceeds go to a mosquito net-making factory in Tanzania that was started by Manhattan’s not-for-profit Acumen Fund.

“Malaria is an issue,” Ms. Helding said, and mosquito nets greatly reduce the chances of contracting the disease. “Women work in it and they produce bed nets. They’re $5 apiece….I truly believe all of us have to do something to give back to this world and make it a better place. We just have to.”

But then Fat Witch has always been about more than just a tasty brownie for Ms. Helding. From the beginning, she wanted to make her brand stand out. Thus, she created Isabel Witch, the fictional proprietor of Fat Witch bakery, who along with daughter Hannah and mother Nellie lead the carb-conscious to sin.

“People are looking for things to relate to,” Ms. Helding said. “It’s the marketing of the 21st century. I like to think our customers, if they are in Chicago and they are in a bakery and they buy a brownie, they go, ‘Oh, this is not a Fat Witch.'”

“Isabel – the hair, the witch hat, the earrings, big jacket, big pocketbook – she’s always flying off somewhere,” she added. “It’s a part of every urban woman who works: She’s a busy woman. We want to relate to that woman and say, ‘Why would you bake brownies? We’re here for you.'”

Not surprisingly, the Web site, fatwitch.com, is nearly as entertaining as it is commercial. Witchscopes and an illustrated Halloween story accompany ways to order the treats from anywhere in the country. This Halloween, Ms. Helding will publish a children’s book called “Hannah’s Homework,” which touts the benefits of work and entrepreneurship.

“The book is aimed at 10-year-olds,” she explained. “It’s basically about how you have to do your homework. Nobody gets lucky all the time.

“There are a lot of books on women and business now, and I thought, let’s do something with a little bit of a twist,” she continued. “You have to start when they’re 8, 9, 10, 11, and tell them that there is this possibility for them. You have to teach them when they’re young.”

The idea for a brownie business took some time to cook up. The youngest of four children, Ms. Helding grew up in Ravinia, Ill., in a creative home with a photographer father and a homemaker mother who loves to bake. She graduated from the University of Illinois in 1956 with a degree in fine art and moved to Boston to teach art for six years.

Life took a detour when she headed to New York to enter New York University’s two-year graduate sociology program. While working on a thesis about how social class determines where you work in a brokerage firm, Ms. Helding became fascinated with finance. She thought, “I can do this.”

For 15 years, she was an equity options trader on the floor of the American Stock Exchange. When the occasion demanded, she baked up her mother’s brownie recipe and brought the results to friends on the floor.

“People started asking me, ‘Where can I buy them? Can I buy some?'” remembered Ms. Helding. “I was like, ‘I can’t charge you! Here I’ll make you some.’ I was going crazy baking at home.”

Those last three years, she started kicking around the idea of starting her own business. She was searching for work that was more “satisfying.”

“While there is excitement, there is not satisfaction that you get by developing your own product and taking it to fruition,” Ms. Helding recalled. “It was great at times, horrible at times – like any job. What made me make the change was the desire for some satisfaction and accomplishment.”

In 1991, with $20,000 in seed money, she took the leap and launched Fat Witch with two flavors, the original Witch (her mother’s recipe, slightly tweaked) and the Walnut Witch. With no formal training in baking, she was smart enough to hire someone to do the sifting and mixing for her.

As she turned to others, like her older sister, for help and insight on building her business, she also learned to trust her own instincts. Against advice, she went and called her company Fat Witch.

“Everybody told me to change the name – everybody,” said Ms. Helding, who also drew the logo. “Women always think they’re fat and they’re bitchy. To a person, they said: ‘Don’t.’ But we knew our target market was the upscale, economically well-off woman. And they have a sense of humor. We try to inject humor and a little sassiness into everything.”

(“Fat Witch” came about because of a banker friend. “You have to stand real close to people on the floor and I had a friend who laughed like a witch,” Ms. Helding explained. “One day, she said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ I said, ‘Oh, now I’ll be next to a fat witch.'”)

The name, obviously, has not been much of a hindrance. Thirteen years later, she’s added the Caramel Witch, the Red Witch (a chocolaty brownie with dried red cherries), Snow Witch, Java Witch, Blonde Witch, and Breakfast Witch (oatmeal, walnut, and coffee brownie). Then there are the baby-size Witches, chocolate-chip cookies, hot chocolate mixes, and clothes, including onesies for infants.

During the peak season, from October to February, Ms. Helding and her employees bake 10,000 brownies a day. She is now looking for a bigger production space, one large enough to increase output to 25,000-50,000. Meanwhile, the Chelsea Market location will become more of a store and cafe.

While she has no regrets about leaving a stable job to become her own boss, it hasn’t been all butter and chocolate. Ms. Helding recalled those early years as “brutal.” Still, she preserved because “I believed. I refused to give up.”

“Most businesses fail,” she said. “It’s more that people give up because it’s rough than fail. People are often not supportive. Almost every woman I talked to would talk about the negative feedback they got. You have to think positive.”