Bloody Brilliant Brownies.

Well, it's been a while. What can I say? I've been busy with other stuff, and a little bit lazy, which is fine, since that's what this blog is all about.

My friend Mez had her birthday party last night and I brought along some of these awesome melt-in-the-mouth brownies. Another friend, jen, who had travelled from Sydney especially to see us and celebrate the birthday, asked if this was a lazy recipe, and it SO is!

So this one's for Jen. Unfortunately, I don't have a photo for this one, but if you've seen one brownie, you've seen them all.

You'll need:
125g dark chocolate
150g butter
1 and a half cups caster sugar
1 cup plain flour
1 teaspoon vanilla essence
1/4 cup cocoa
3 eggs
whatever else you want to put in them (chocolate chips, nuts, mini marshmallows, etc)

Fire up your oven to 180C

Break up the chocolate into pieces, dice up the butter and shove them into a microwave safe jug (you want something with high sides so that you can mix it about without worrying about spills.), and pop it in the microwave for 1 minute. If the beutter is melted after 1 minute, take it out and start mixing with a spatula until the chocolate is melted into the butter and it's smooth. If you need to nuke it for a little longer, do it in 20 second increments. The last thing you want to do is seize (burn) the chocolate and have to start over. That's just a waste.

Set that aside, and crack the eggs into a medium mixing bowl, along with the caster sugar and vanilla essence. Use a whisk to beat it until combined, then add the chocolate mixture and whisk that until it's all combined together.

Here's the secret with brownies. Once you add the dry ingredients, you want to move (beat, stir, whisk) the mixture as LITTLE as possible. So next we're going to sift in the flour and cocoa, then slowly, using the whisk, make cutting motions and long round strokes to bring it all together. This would be the time to also add any nuts and chocolate chips or whatever you're going to put in there.

Once that's all roughly combined, line a baking tray with greaseproof paper. (I like to use this corningware dish that I have. It's about 40cm x 20cm or thereabouts, and about 5cm thick. Using the spatula that you stirred the chocolate mixture with and haven't bothered cleaning yet, let's get all of that mixture into the baking dish and put it into the oven for 40minutes.

Use your first batch as a test run. Pull them out after 40 minutes, let it cool in the baking dish completely, then remove it, take away the greaseproof paper and put the slab onto a cutting board, using a long knife to slice it into long rectangles or squares, whichever you'd prefer.
If the brownies are too sticky, add 5 minutes to your cooking time next time. If they are too dry/cake-like, take away 5 minutes.

There are a couple of ways that you can finish these off. Traditionally, we dust them with icing sugar. You can just leave them as they are, or you can try this decadent, ridiculous peanut butter option:

Spread a thin layer of peanut butter (enough so that the surface is completely coated with no gaps, but not thick. If you use too much, they'll stick to the roof of your mouth and be gross.) over the top of the brownie slab before you slice it. Then melt about 150g of milk chocolate and spread that over the top of the peanut butter. Set it in the fridge for half an hour before you slice it. You want the chocolate to be set enough that it's no longer runny, and still soft enough that it slices and doesn't crack irregularly when you run the knife through it.

So there you have it. BROWNIES!

ENJOY!

Katy
xoxo