Brownies

I met up with the lovely Kerry from the fabulous My Lovebumps blog last week.

Weirdly enough, she lives in my town. I say weirdly, as we met online (now that does sound weird…)

Along with a couple of other lovely bloggers, she runs The Pinaddicts Challenge. And you all must know by now, I am a Pinterest addict, and I quite like a challenge. So I have been taking part of this for the last few months (still yet to win though, sniff!)

Anyway, as usual, I digress, we met up to discuss The Pinaddicts Challenge, and the state of the town following on from my little rant.

I had promised her cake. And there was no cake. So I thought I would make brownies, and being super-frugal and in the spirit of ‘Waste not, want not’, I used up these chocolate lollies we had leftover from Christmas!

I am not kidding, these really are the best brownies ever ever ever. Even if I do say so myself.

They are from this great book “Brownies” by Linda Collister

Just in case you want to give them a try…

This is what you need:

• 150g good-quality plain chocolate (or 100g of cheapo milk chocolate lollies, and 50g dark chocolate!)
• 200g unsalted butter, softened (I used salted, shoot me)
• 400g caster sugar-no that is not a typo….
• 1.5 tsp vanilla essence
• 3 large free-range eggs
• 130g plain flour
• 3 tbsp cocoa powder

This is what you do:

• Pre-heat the oven to 180C (350F)/gas mark 4
• Break the chocolate into a bowl and then melt in the microwave-I do it for a minute, then stir, then in 30s blasts, stirring in between
• Beat the butter in a mixer until creamy and soft
• Add the sugar and vanilla essence and beat again until soft and fluffy this time
• Add the eggs one at a time whilst still beating, then add the melted chocolate NB. turn the mixer off before adding the chocolate, or at least down to it’s lowest speed-take it from me, melted chocolate is hard to clean off walls…
• Sift in the flour and cocoa (I never normally sift, but I do usually with this one, to try and give it a bit of air-not entirely sure it makes any difference) and mix well
• At this stage you can add some extras if you like: chopped pecans/walnuts; chopped chocolate etc
• Spoon the mix into a lined brownie tin-mine is about 20x25cm and spread it out evenly

• Bake in the oven for 40-50 minutes ish (sorry, being quite vague! I checked mine after 30mins and it still needed longer. To test it-a skewer inserted halfway between the centre line and the side should come out just clean, but should still be a bit sticky in the middle)
• Leave to cool for as long as you can bear until just warm, then remove from the tin and devour….