This is going to be one picture heavy post. Let me warn you now. It’s been a week and a half, ladies, and I want to apologise. I was actually off university last week on my mid semester break and had wonderful plans to fill my time with blogging and studying and generally having a nice relaxing time. However I ended up being in work from Friday until Monday with Tuesday off, then Wednesday to Friday with Saturday off and now Sunday until tonight when I’m working quite late. But I have a lot of short snappy posts planned to get me back into the swing of things so hopefully you can forgive me!
As I said, I had Saturday off my work and, of course, Saturday was Halloween. I was alone in my flat, but luckily I had been invited to a party by some work friends so I spent the day baking so I would have something to take with me. I made cakes, brownies and cookies but I only have pictures of the brownies! Lots of making of pictures, actually.
The recipe I used was from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook but I actually found it on Helen’s blog. However after loving how these brownies turn out I have asked my boyfriend to get me it for Christmas, obviously with lots of smiling and batting of my eyelashes. So here are the pictures. Lots of them, as I keep saying. I’m just trying to warn you!
You can actually see everything I bought there from my new square pan to the cookie mix I bought (more on that later).
Mmm, butter and dark chocolate. My thighs were not happy with me.
Hello sugar on my cheap scales.
Lumpy flour. Yum. Apparently it was organic though, because that’s all Sainsbury’s had.
Slightly blurry picture of melting butter and chocolate. I normally would have chucked this in the microwave, but I think I’ll stick to melting things over the hob now.
Lots of eggs whisked up in a measuring cup. This is because I had to bake the brownies in two batches and the recipe called for three eggs.
I did have pictures of the mixture after adding each ingredient but I want to save a bit of time here now. That’s the final mixture with everything above in it. It’s quite thick and looks quite grainy.
And my buttered pan. This was a 19cm by 19cm square cake tin from Sainsbury’s and cost me £2.99. I’ve scratched it already while trying to cut the brownies, but I don’t think that has made it any worse off. It’s a nice sized pan and is perfect for this recipe if you want to bake in two batches.
And the finished product. The top and edges were lovely and crispy while the inside was moist and soft. Someone did comment that it was like chocolate flavoured butter, so I might cut down on the butter a but next time. I cut each tin into 12 smallish pieces, but a small portion is really all you need.
The cookie mix I used was a white chocolate one from Betty Crocker and I was so disappointed with it. I tend to use the Asda/Tesco cookie mixes if I don’t have time to bake my own from scratch. While I only paid about 83p for the Betty mix (it was on offer in Sainsbury’s) I think I’ll stick with the Asda/Tesco mixes as they’re a little bit cheaper but ten times better. The Betty mix was just too crunchy though I’d taken them out a bit earlier than the pack said to.
Finally, this was the first time I had actually baked brownies and I’m so pleased with how they turned out. Tell me ladies, have you ever cooked anything which you thought turned out extremely well?
Chocolate-flavoured butter sounds rather good to me! It's ages since I made brownies, or baked anything for that matter, I rather miss it but I never seem to have the time. I may set aside an hour or two this weekend though :)
ReplyDeleteThe abundance of butter kept the inside nice and moist, but I think it might have been a little bit too much. I'm going to have another go today with white chocolate as well as dark to give a bit of a kick to it.
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