I must have looked at a couple of dozen recipes before settling on this one. The wife is very partial to a bit of chocolate brownie, and being a connoisseur, I knew it would take a lot to impress her. My preference is for them to be very fudgy and gooey, so not a lot of flour goes in, relative to the rest of the ingredients.
Please note that most recipes online are designed for an 8 inch by 8 inch baking tray, but my tray is 12 inches x 8 inches, so I had to adjust accordingly. However, I still ended up making more than I needed to. I think brownies need to have a little less depth than mine ended up with.
The ingredient list is:-
250g Unsalted butter
250g Dark Chocolate chips
225g Brown Sugar
4 Eggs
90g Plain flour
1 tsp Vanilla extract
40g Cocoa Powder
Pinch of Salt (not shown)
Oven pre-heated to 180°C or 160°C if you're fan assisted
That's an awful lot of sugar and chocolate!
The first thing to do is to gently melt the chocolate and butter together. I did this using the microwave, as you can see from the picture, but a pan on the stove would probably be better as it will give you more control of the heat.
I used a low power setting on the microwave. The last thing I wanted was to end up with an explosion of butter and chocolate to clean up in there! Go slowly and keep stirring.
When it came out, this is what it looked like. As you can see, there are still a few bits of butter, but with a little more stirring, the latent heat will melt them and everything will combine nicely into the shiny 'sauce' you see below.
Next, we add the vanilla extract...
Followed by the sugar...
Add the sugar a little at a time until it's dissolved and combined before adding the eggs.
To complete the batter, add the flour and cocoa powder. I used Dutch Cocoa which is the method by which the powder is produced rather than where it's grown. I read that for baking, it's much better to use than natural powder. I've no doubt there are many good reasons why, but what I do know is that it's expensive stuff!
When adding the dry ingredients, keep stirring gently; you don't want to get too much air into the batter and create lots of air bubbles.
A few words about my baking tray. Being a little OCD, I like things to be the same size, so when I saw this brownie tin on SHopee, I just had to have it. Perfectly shaped brownies of a uniform size were a great attraction. However, there was one slight snag which I'll mention at the end of the post.
Firstly, I gave all the dividers a little greasing using a little butter before lining it with baking parchment.
Why bother with the parchment? I use the parchment because it allows me to easily lift the whole brownie out of the tin when it's cooked without it breaking up.
I slowly poured in the batter, which filled the tray, perhaps a little too full!
Before carefully replacing the dividers.
And popping it into the oven
The cooking time is important. After 20 minutes, jab them with a toothpick to see how much batter remains on the stick when you pull it out. If you like them super gooey, 20 minutes is fine. The longer you leave them, the more like 'cake' they become, so keep checking every two minutes, depending upon your preference.
For once, I got the timing just right for how I like the consistency of my brownies to be!
Now, I mentioned a slight snag with the baking tray. It's simply that the brownies take on a slightly 'loaf' style shape which I don't like, especially since I made too much mixture and they were very deep. This didn't affect the taste, they were delicious, but next time, I might make a little less and get the ruler out to measure before cutting them by hand!
The other issue was that the tops didn't quite have that flaky, light brown look about them, and I'm unsure why. No matter, the wife loved them so I'm sure I'll be making these regularly, although if I told her how much I'd spent on the ingredients, it may not be so regular!
@commentrewarder is added as a beneficiary to properly reward all your amazing comments.All that remains is to send my best wishes for a happy, healthy and productive week ahead.
Thank you
@nathen007