Chocolate Brownies

A few weeks ago now, when I still had the baking bug, I whipped together a batch of chocolate brownie cupcakes!  I used a recipe I found on the BBC Good Food website that I’ve listed below for you to refer to.  I made some changes when following the recipe, which I found to work pretty well – but you guys might feel better following the pros.  Either way, let me know how you get on below, mine turned out pretty good!

·         185g unsalted butter

·         185g best dark chocolate

·         85g plain flour

·         40g cocoa powder

·         50g white chocolate

·         50g milk chocolate

·         3 large egg

·         275g golden caster sugar

First, I preheated the oven to 180C.  I then mashed up the butter into randomly cut blocks in a large bowl and chucked in the dark chocolate that I had broken up into squares.  I then put the bowl into the microwave for around 3 three minutes – taking it out every thirty seconds to check and stir.  Once full melted, I put it to the side and left it to cool.

Next, I weighed out the flour and cocoa powder and put the two into a medium sized bowl.  The online recipe said to sieve the two before mixing them together, but when my mum pointed out that she never sieves anything (and her baking is amazing) – I decided to skip this step.  I’d probably just make a mess anyways.

The next step was to break up the chocolate bars – which I found to be a hell of a lot easier than what the online method made out to be.  I pretty much just broke the bars up into the squares, and then broke the squares up further into random chunks and mixed it all together.  This resulted in a lot of random sized chunks, which I wasn’t super fussy about because let’s be honest – who doesn’t like big chunks of chocolate in their brownies?

This next part was messy, thankfully though my mum has an electric hand mixer and so it didn’t take nearly as long as I had anticipated.  I cracked the eggs into another large bowl, and tipped the caster sugar in with it.  I then used the mixer on the highest speed for around about three minutes, until it turned to a nice thick and creamy mixture.  This probably doubled in size and the colour became a lot paler – like the online method stated. 

It was then time to pour the chocolate and butter mix in with the egg and caster sugar, which didn’t take very long at all.  I used a wooden spoon to mix it all together, and added in the flour and cocoa powder to the mix.  I added this in little by little, folding it through so that the mixture came to a thick and sticky consistency.  When this was ready, I then chucked in the bowl of chocolate chunks and gave it another stir.

The brownie mix was then ready to pop into the oven – and so I poured a little bit of the mixture into each cupcake case, leaving enough room for them to raise a little.  Around about 25 cases later, the brownie cupcakes were ready to pop into the oven and to be left for 20-30 minutes until they became nice and spongey.  When ready, take them out of the oven and leave for about 10 minutes until cool!  And voila – you’ve got some super tasty brownie cupcakes ready to be munched on!

Does anyone else make their brownies into cupcakes?

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/1223/bestever-brownies - in case you prefer to follow the pros.

Until the next one,

Lauren x