It’s Mr C’s birthday today (Sunday 8th November – I wrote this a day ahead) and I’m afraid I was a bad wife (my view not his) and failed to get him a birthday cake. So, while he’s out at at a church meeting I’ve been making a large tin of chocolate brownies. As I hadn’t planned this and therefore didn’t actually have the required amount of cooking chocolate in the house, I added 100g of left-over dark chocolate Toblerone to the 200g of white cooking chocolate I had in the cupboard. It is quite amazing how long that Toblerone has been in the house – since last May! Not sure how it escaped being consumed for so long! But perhaps it was just waiting to serve its purpose today.
The other slightly uconventional thing I’ve had to do is to use a round cake tin instead of the more traditional square, low-sided tin brownies should be made in (according to what I have read and observed). It’s the only tin I have, apart from a small loaf tin, which would have been even less suitable.
Otherwise, the recipe was stolen from Nigel Slater and amended as described above and below:
Ingredients:
- 300g caster sugar
- 250g olive oil spread
- 200g white chocolate
- 100g dark chocolate Toblerone
- 3 large eggs plus 1 extra egg yolk
- 60g plain flour
- 60g cocoa powder
- 1/2 tsp baking powder
Method:
- Set the oven to 180°C/Gas Mark 4
- Put sugar and olive spread into a bowl and beat for several minutes until white and fluffy
- Break the chocolate into pieces, set 50g of it aside and melt the rest in a bowl suspended over, but not touching, a pan of simmering water
- As soon as the chocolate has melted remove it from the heat
- Chop the remaining 50g of chocolate into small pieces
- Break the eggs into a bowl and beat them lightly with a fork
- Sift the flour, cocoa and baking powder together
- Mix the egg into the olive spread and sugar mixture a little at a time
- Add the chopped and melted chocolate
- Fold in the flour and cocoa
- Scrape the mixture into a greased cake tin, smooth the top and bake for 30 minutes
- After 30 minutes, the top of the cale should have risen slightly and the cake will appear slightly softer in the middle than around the edges
- Pierce the centre of the cake with a fork – it should come out sticky, but not with raw cake mixture on it. If there is raw mixture on the fork, return the cake to the oven for three more minutes
- As Nigel says, “it is worth remembering that it will solidify a little on cooling, so if it appears a bit wet, don’t worry.”
- Cut the cake into brownie-sized pieces.
I am also lacking proper brownie-making apparatus, so I improvised in a similarly pleasing manner. I used my muffin mould to make lovely big chocolate brownie muffins. They are quite marvellous, if I say so myself.