April 18, 2011

MY FIRST BROWNIES

Earlier in the year a new face appeared with her own series of cooking programmes on the TV.

Lorraine Pascale is a trained pastry chef and she set about telling us how easy baking is – well she would, wouldn’t she !! If you see anything done by an expert it always looks easy.

Anyway, I liked the look of some of her recipes so I lashed out on the book that goes with the programme and decided to have a go.

book

I have never made brownies before and thought Lorraine’s recipe looked unusual so this is what I made :

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Cookies and cream fudge brownies

The recipe uses lots of eggs, sugar, surprisingly little flour, chocolate and something I had never come across before, Oreo biscuits.

You can see the recipe on the BBC website here.

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As it happens, I picked up the ones with the chocolate cream filling rather than the white filling by mistake, not realising there were two types.

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You have to break the biscuits into pieces, mix some into the batter then sprinkle the rest on top before putting it into the oven.

The recipe said to put 1/3 of the biscuits in the mixture and 2/3 on top.  I decided to do half and half.

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I was a bit concerned that the ones on top would bake dry and become too crunchy, but they didn’t.

My very first brownies, looking exactly like the ones on the telly and the picture in the book.  They were delicious and definitely very easy.

Cookies and cream fudge brownies

Ingredients

165g butter

200g good quality dark chocolate

3 eggs plus 2 egg yolks

2 tsp vanilla extract

165g light soft brown sugar

2 tbslp plain flour

1 tblsp cocoa powder

pinch of salt

1 pack of Oreo biscuits, dark with white cream filling

Method

Preheat the oven to 180°fan/gas mk 4.  Grease and line a 20cm square baking tin.  Leave some paper overlapping the sides.

Grate or chop the chocolate.  Gently melt the butter in a medium pan.  Then take it off the heat and add the chocolate, stirring until smooth.

In a large bowl, whisk the egg yolks, eggs and vanilla using an electric mixer until light and fluffy.  Whisk in the sugar in two halves.  Whisk until the mixture starts to stiffen then pour in the chocolate and whisk again.

Add the flour, salt and cocoa powder and stir in.  Break the biscuits roughly into halves and add half of them to the mixture.

Tip the mixture into the tin and level the surface gently so as not to lose your whisked-in air.  Scatter the other half of the broken biscuits on top.  Bake for 25-30 minutes.  They should be just set but soft in the middle.

Leave the cake to cool in the tin.  It will sink and crack on top.  Remove from the tin and cut into squares.  Dust with icing sugar.

Makes 16 brownies, or thereabouts.

3 comments:

  1. They look delicious. Diane

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  2. We watched and enjoyed Lorraine's programme. She made some lovely things and every week I found myself saying "I must look at the website for the recipes" - but didn't!

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  3. Elizabeth - I cheated and bought the book. It makes great bed-time reading !!

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