Brownie – The Hectic Cook

Fudgy Easter Egg Brownie

Fudgy Easter Egg Brownies – Fudgy, chocolatey brownie filled with mini chocolate eggs. A perfect Easter treat!

Easter is a fairly horrendous time of year for anyone trying to lose a few pounds. For a nation struggling with an obesity problem, I find it somewhat ironic that you can’t move for chocolate at this time of year. Every shop is laden. And not just the supermarkets. Clothes shops. Chemists. Even home improvement shops. The Malteaster Bunnies were throwing themselves into my basket in Homebase. Honestly. There’s no escape.

Facebook and Pinterest are awash with Easter treats you can make at home. I can’t log in to Facebook without seeing some ridiculously luscious looking baked creation, dripping in chocolate and Easter eggs. This is doing my battle with the bulge no good at all. So bollocks to it. If you can’t beat them, join them.

This brownie is very rich and chocolatey. If you’re more a ‘lightweight’ brownie kind of person, these may not be for you. But they’re gooey. And fudgy. And very very chocolatey. So if that’s how you like your brownies, you should give these a whirl. And I’ve chucked some mini chocolate Easter eggs in to make them seasonal.

Ingredients

200g dark chocolate (minimum 70% cocoa)
250g unsalted butter
300g caster sugar
4 medium eggs
1 tbsp vanilla extract
65g plain flour
65g cocoa, sifted
1/2 tsp baking powder
about 16 mini chocolate eggs

1. Preheat your oven to 180°C (160°C fan) / 350°F / Gas 4.

2. Line and grease a 9″ square tin (or equivalent) – I used my silicon tin so I didn’t have to line it, just grease it (with groundnut oil, but butter is good too). By ‘line it’, just plonk a piece of greaseproof paper in the tray. Don’t bother cutting anything.

3. Melt the dark chocolate either in the microwave (in 30 second bursts, stirring in between) or in a bowl over a pan of simmering water (bain marie).

4. Beat the butter with the sugar until pale and creamy – I used my hand mixer for this.

5. Crack in the eggs and beat again to combine.

6. Gently fold into this the melted chocolate plus the vanilla extract.

7. Fold in the flour, cocoa and baking powder.

This is a really thick mixture. It isn’t a runny brownie mix at all. It’s also extremely chocolatey.

8. Spoon half of the mixture into your prepared tin. I’ll not lie, this isn’t the easiest job. The mixture is very thick, and doesn’t really want to be spread out.

9. Remove the foil from all of your mini eggs (sorry if this seems obvious, but just in case, you never know…) and arrange them over the brownie layer in the tin. I used 16 and arranged them fairly regularly. You can arrange them however you like. I used the mixed bags of Cadbury eggs, but use whatever you fancy.

Then dot the remainder of the brownie mix over the mini eggs and smooth it out so the eggs are covered. It’ll look a bit bumpy, but that’s ok.

10. Pop the brownie into your preheated oven for 30 minutes (no more, no less – there’s no checking for done-ness here, simply remove it after exactly 30 minutes). Take it out of the oven and let it cool completely, in the tin.

Once it has cooled, pop it into the fridge for at least an hour – it needs this time in the fridge to bring it together so you can then cut it into squares.

11. Remove the brownie from the tin and cut into squares.

I make these brownies for the Husband who has a real soft spot for them. I’ll then find brownie crumbs all over the house every time he’s been into the box. He’s hardly subtle.

You can use this brownie recipe and chuck anything in to it. The rest of the year I add 100g chopped milk chocolate, and 100g chopped white chocolate. I love it with huge chunks of chocolate throughout. I hope you like it too.

Happy cooking!

[amd-zlrecipe-recipe:37]

Brownie In A Mug

A gorgeous, gooey, chocolatey brownie dessert, made in a mug, ready in under 5 minutes. Delicious!

So you’re either going to love me or hate me for this post. You’ll love me, because this is the simplest and quickest recipe possible for achieving the most gorgeous, fudgy, chocolatey, delicious dessert possible. Or you’ll hate me. Because this is the simplest and quickest recipe possible for achieving the most gorgeous, fudgy, chocolatey, delicious dessert possible. You get the picture?

I’ve made this twice in the past week. All for myself as well (don’t tell the Husband – well if he will go away with work and leave me with four small ~~imps~~ children). To be fair, the first time was experimental, to see if it would work. The second time was in order to take photographs for this blog post. See what I have to endure for this blog? Selfless to a fault.

I got this recipe from Pinterest, from Musings of a Gem, and pretty much followed the recipe as it is. The original recipe is in US cups though, so I’ve made the conversions to grams. So here it is. Possibly the best/worst discovery of my (waistline’s) life.

Ingredients

35g (1/4 cup) plain flour
50g (1/4 cup packed) brown sugar
15g (2 tbsp) cocoa
∼20g (2 tbsp) butter, melted (or mild vegetable oil)
2 tbsp milk
handful of chocolate chips

1. Mix the flour, sugar and cocoa together in your mug/bowl, ensuring there are no lumps left. I used a little individual bowl as it made life a bit easier, but this will work fine in a microwavable mug. The sugar I used was soft brown, but you could use light brown, muscovado etc. You could use white sugar, however brown sugar will give a richer taste. Lastly, do use proper cocoa. This will just not be the same with drinking chocolate.

2. Next add the butter and milk. You can use oil if you’d prefer, but I figured butter would taste a bit better so used that. Give the mixture a good stir ensuring no lumps of dry mix are left. This will be fairly thick and gooey. Add to this your chocolate chips and mix in. I used white chocolate. You can use whatever you’d prefer. Or leave out if you’d rather. Or add nuts, fruit etc. Experiment and find out how you like it.

3. Pop this in the microwave (no need to cover) and cook on full power for 30 second intervals. I found mine was cooked after 80 seconds (I realise that’s not a 30 second interval, but I judged it and got it out early). In case it helps, our microwave is 800W. You want it spongy on top, but still gooey. If you start to smell burnt chocolate, STOP COOKING.

It’s not the prettiest picture in the world, but by golly, it was bloody amazing. I added a scoop of ice-cream – what goes on the side is important in my world.

My first experience, I failed to finish. I managed fine the second time. It’s clearly about practise 😉

Happy cooking!

*NOTE*

Because I’m a Brit, all my measurements are metric, so I have to change some recipes from US cups. Up until now, I haven’t included the US measurements, however, I could if I thought it would be useful. I could also make conversions from metric to cups for the British recipes I make. If you’d like me to, please do get in touch and let me know 🙂

Chocolate Mint Brownie Slice

Chocolate brownie and mint join forces to create this amazing traybake. A must for all chocolate mint fans.

I have a bit of sweet tooth. Ok so the Husband is currently guffawing into his tea. Fine, it’s maybe more than a bit. It’s maybe more like a whole mouthful of sweet teeth. I keep seeing all these tv programmes about how bad sugar is for you, and the celebrities giving it up left, right and centre. And I have tried. But I can’t. I just can’t.

I have a particular fondness for cake. So much so, that just over a year ago I started a cake club with a few of my friends. We started off trying new things, having a theme each month, and experimenting with what we made. That has since turned into just any excuse for us to get together of an evening once a month, without any screaming children, drink some wine, and eat cake. Needs must.

So this was my last bake for Cake Club (it deserves the capitals). I’m an absolute sucker for chocolate mint. I’d happily chomp my way through a box of After Eights given half a chance – or if the guilt didn’t set in. So I’d seen these knocking about Pinterest for a while, and decided it was time to give them a go. I used my own recipe for the brownie, and made something up for the mint layer. Thankfully it worked, and the result was a pretty god damn good slice of deliciousness.

Ingredients

Brownie:

200g dark chocolate, 70% cocoa
250g unsalted butter, softened
300g caster sugar
100g plain flour
50g cocoa
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
3 eggs
1 tbsp vanilla

1. Line and grease a 9″ tin, or a similarly sized tin. You can see that by ‘line’, I was highly precise. I used some groundnut oil to grease, but you could use spray oil or melted butter.

2. Melt the dark chocolate, either in the microwave in 30 second bursts (stir well between each time, as chocolate burns pretty easily), or in a bowl over a pan of simmering water on the cooker. Set this aside to cool slightly.

3. Cream the butter with the sugar until light and fluffy. I used a hand mixer this time which takes a bit more mixing than my standing mixer, but this is what adds lightness to your mixture so you can’t really be half-arsed about it. Then beat in the 3 eggs and finally the vanilla.

4. In a separate bowl sieve the flour, cocoa, salt and baking powder. It’s best to sieve these ingredients to avoid any lumps.

5. Add the melted chocolate to the butter/sugar mixture and fold in. Try to be as gentle as possible to retain as much air in the mixture as possible.

6. Add the dry ingredients and again fold everything in together. This is quite a thick brownie mixture – often brownie mixes are fairly liquid.

7. Fill your pre-lined tin with this mixture and smooth out as much as possible. It’s so thick this mixture, that it takes a bit of effort to get it into the corners, and evenly spread – the baking parchment moves about a lot and makes it quite fiddly, but the parchment is a godsend when you have to take the slice out of the tin.

8. Bake this for 30 minutes at 160°C(fan)/300°F/Gas 2. Don’t worry about whether the centre is cooked or any such gubbins at this point. Just trust the process. Let the brownie cool completely on a wire rack (still in the tin), then put it in the fridge for at least an hour to fully cool. The trick with brownie is to cook it at a lowish heat until its not quite done, then cool it completely once out so that it retains that lovely gooey middle we all love, but you can slice it fairly easily.

Mint Layer:

100g unsalted butter, softened
400g icing sugar
3 tbsp milk
3 tsp peppermint extract
green colouring

9. Start to beat the butter and icing sugar (no need to sieve) together, then add the remaining ingredients and beat and beat and beat some more, until you have a lovely light fluffy minty green buttercream. This is where standing mixers come into their own – I had no idea buttercream could be so fluffy and gorgeous until I owned my mixer. However, if you don’t have one, at least use a hand mixer (beg, borrow or steal if necessary) and beat it until you’re thoroughly bored. Then beat it some more. I promise you, the more you beat it, the better it will be.

10. Layer the mint buttercream onto the brownie (still in the tin) and spread it evenly to fully cover the bottom layer. Chuck this into the fridge for at least half an hour to let the buttercream harden.

In case you were wondering, I used the above peppermint extract (mine is from Lakeland, but I think most supermarkets will have some) and green colouring (it’s a paste because that’s what I use for cake decoration, but you could use any green colouring you can get your hands on). If you’re like my lovely friend Sarah, who goes loopy at the merest hint of colouring, you can leave it out completely. It’ll still taste exactly the same, it just won’t have that amazing 70’s vibe about it.

Chocolate Top Coat:

200g milk chocolate
15g unsalted butter

11. Melt the chocolate together with the butter, again either in the microwave or in a bowl over simmering water. Pour this over the mint layer and spread to fully cover. I topped mine with some Aero mint balls for decoration.

12. Leave the chocolate to cool and set at room temperature, then take the whole thing out of the tin (using the paper) and slice into whatever sized pieces you desire.

I found that the longer this was left, the mintier it seemed to get. Not that it lasted that long. With the three layers, its not the quickest of traybakes to make, but its one of those first bakes that I’ll most definitely be baking again. It is truly worth it.

Anyway, I promised myself some Ben’n’Jerry’s once I’d finished this blog. So I’ll be off….

Happy cooking!