Conversations through the middle

Life from a (slightly) more mature perspective

Foodie Friday – quick, quick brownies


I found this recipe when I was browsing the internet looking for something I could bake for Dot mid week. I was after something quick, nothing complicated and something with a bit of a yum factor. After a few hours timewasting when I should have been working, and countless recipes later, I came across these brownies.

Last time I made brownies they were so rich (too chocalatey, yes there is such a thing, so overpowering they made you gag) and they took ages to make. This time I had none of that. I baked them today and they turned out, well, different, but nonetheless delicious with lots of yum factor – or so Dot tells me…


Chocolate brownie or Christmas pudding?


Ingredients 
200g butter or margarine
165g cocoa powder
400g light brown soft sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
125g plain flour
2 eggs
100g chocolate chunks (or broken chocolate)
Method 
1. Grease and line a 20 x 18cm tin. Preheat the oven to 180°C / gas mark 4.
2. Melt the butter and cocoa together in a saucepan. Add the sugar and vanilla. Mix thoroughly.
3. Remove from the heat and mix in the flour then the eggs. Mix and add the chocolate chunks (or broken chocolate). Pour into the baking tin.
4. Bake for 20 minutes. The brownies are cooked when the top is slightly springy.
5. Cool and cut into 15 slices.

See, it looks like mud!
Just a couple of things to add to this:
Nothing in the recipe tells you where to put the chocolate chunks (!) so I added them to the final mixture, just before putting the tin in the oven. I also used a 100g bar of chocolate instead of chocolate chunks – I used one with 70% cocoa and it also contained cocoa nibs (they are the little bits you can see in the photos). I have to say Dot had great fun bashing the **** out of the chocolate bar so we ended up with lots of little bits.

I’m not a great cook. Or a great baker. That much is obvious from the photographs. My brownies look like mud, and nothing like they look in the picture on the website. When they came out of the oven there were pools of liquid lying on top; the brownies looked more like Christmas pudding than brownies. When they had cooled and I cut them into squares, well they weren’t squares. Some of them resemble squares, the rest simply mashed up into bits. I left them in the oven longer than 20 minutes, just because of the liquid pooling on top. So when I tried to cut them they were rock hard on the edges but soft towards the middle.

Yet I think that worked and I have discovered something new. They are gooey but chewy, hard yet soft, they should be awful but they taste delicious. Not to blow my own trumpet, but both Dot and OH couldn’t get enough of them. And me, well I tasted a tiny bit, despite the diet, and I think they are wonderful!

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