The village duck pond
5/365
4/365
The last tin of Christmas sweets – quick, somebody hide them before I blow my diet in the first week!
Follow this blog (quick, before it gets away!)
Forgive me if this post comes across as a little self-indulgent, but I’ve decided to add a ‘follow this blog’ button to 40s Chic.
It’s something I’ve noticed other blogs and websites are doing more and more, and it seems sensible to have something like this (unless of course it turns out I attract no followers and am Billy No Mates, in which case it will just be embarrassing.)
There’s a practical reason for doing it as well. Now I’ve started running giveaways, companies and PRs keep asking me how many followers I have, how many page views and other how many questions that I don’t know the answer to.
True, the back office bit of my blog gives an indication of page views, but it doesn’t give me followers; I installed Feedburner to find out about followers but that seems to only include some, I think the people who subscribe by email (though I could be wrong). So then I signed up for Google Analytics – aargh, it’s a nightmare to understand; it does show followers but the number varies according to what day it is. *Sigh*
So finally I’m going to go with Google Friend Connect and just cross my fingers that I don’t turn out to be Billy No Mates.
Help me avoid that hell by signing up to follow 40s Chic through the new button in the side bar. And leaving a comment below to tell me what you think. :o)
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…
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| 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.
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| 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!
