Recipe: Chocolate Brownies

In the heavily pregnant, highly hormonal, glory days between finishing work and giving birth, I went through a cooking and eating phase.  Gone were all good intentions of not putting on too much weight, I was the size of a small whale, seven days overdue and goddammit if I didn’t deserve cake then then when did I?!  It was, I can say with the heavily rose-tinted hindsight specs on, a magical time filled with food, sleep and yet more food.  Although if you ask my husband he’ll probably make up some story about a woman who swore every two seconds, cried continuously and took to shouting ‘why won’t you f-ing come out’ at her bump whilst stuffing in anything fatty and losing half of it down her bra/on her bump (saving it for later, right ladies?!), but he’s a habitual liar with a god awful memory so I would ignore him completely.

In my head cooking cakes would completely prepare me for motherhood.  I had visions of me presenting my husband with a delicious cake on his arrival home from work each day, with our cherubic little one perched on my hip and some artily positioned specks of flour across our faces despite the spotless kitchen.  Again, I refer you to heavily hormonal and quite possibly mad as a hatter.  I digress.  None of those things have happened yet, but I DID manage to make some pretty delicious brownies in the process and if a woman incubating a baby elephant can manage them, then you can too.

You will need:

• 200g dark chocolate
• 100g unsalted butter, very soft
• 250g caster sugar
• 4 large free range eggs, beaten to mix
• 1tsp vanilla essence
• 60g plain flour
• 60g cocoa powder

Recipe:

1. Pre-heat your oven to 180C. Grease a 15cm square tin and line the base with baking paper
2. Melt the chocolate being careful not to burn it (or you!).  Once melted, remove from the heat and set to one side
3. Beat the butter, sugar and vanilla essence together until fluffy then combine in the eggs, one at a time
4. Mix in the melted chocolate, flour and cocoa powder
5. Spread into your pre-prepared tin and bake until they are just starting to firm.  – Brownie cooking is an art form as they’ll continue to cook and solidify once out of the oven.  Don’t worry, this just means you’ll have to make plenty of batches to ‘perfect’ them
6. Once you’re happy they’re cooked, remove from the oven and allow to cool.  Mark them out whilst they’re still a little warm for ease
7. Store in the fridge for brownie perfection and watch them disappear!

Recipe taken from Good to Know