Donna Hay's Raspberry-Spiked Chocolate Brownies

Oh boy, oh boy, oh BOY, these are scrum-diddily-umptious! Diddily.

Assuming you like rasperries.

If you don't, you'll probably hate them.

But that's not really my problem. More brownies for me!

I made Donna's Raspberry-Spiked Chocolate Brownies for my friend Jody's kitchen tea, along with those Short-Black Cupcakes I posted out a few posts back (I'm having connection dramas so I won't give you the link but you can probably find it yourself if you click on Recipe on the word cloud in the side bar). I've made them before with the same results but I never bloody learn. See notes below.

Oh, FYI, I refer to her simply as "Donna", cos we're, like, totz BFFs. Totz.

Again, the recipe is out of Chocolate from her Simple Essentials range, available for purchase here (see disclaimer below).

200g dark chocolate, chopped

250g butter <-- always onto a winner when your baked good contains a whole block of butter :)

1 3/4c brown sugar

4 eggs

1 1/3c plain flour

1/4tsp baking powder

1/3c cocoa powder, sifted

1 1/2c raspberries, fresh or frozen

Preheat oven to 180oC. Melt chocolate and butter over low heat and stir until smooth (note that this is where I diverged from the instructions to save some washing up, but I don't think it made a great deal of difference). Remove from the heat and add the sugar and stir. Then add the eggs and stir quickly as you add each one (I made the assumption that the saucepan may cause the chocolate mixture to retain heat and therefore cook the eggs on impact, so I wanted to make sure I didn't have big fat chunks of cooked egg in my mixture!). Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa and mix.

Pour into a 23cm, greased and lined square cake tin (line it a fair way up the sides so you can pull the brownie out using the baking paper once it's done and plop it on the cooling rack). Top with raspberries and bake for 45 minutes or until set. Brownies should be very fudgy in the middle.

Note that this final instruction is somewhat misleading. It never **really** sets, and my definition of "fudgy" is more like "moist mud cake; lot of crumbs and a little batter may stick to the skewer when you test it", whereas in this instance I think it means "thick cake batter".

Foolishly, I made the mistake of leaving it in the oven to cool while I ran off to the movies, and as a result the edges dried out and charred a little. This meant that I had to cut the outsides off and lost at least 1/4 of each brownie, if not more.

The instructions stop after the notes on the texture, but I think that you would ideally let it cool in the tin for 5-10 minutes to keep some moisture in the outer edges, and then lift it onto a cooling rack. I also found that refrigerating them overnight kind of made them set a bit better.

They're very sweet and rich and fudgy, but the raspberries really set that off. I love foods that feature two competing flavours like this. Definitely a winner!

Note that if there is no photo of the brownies then this means that I have been unable to transfer the photo from my phone to my laptop before the scheduled post date. Or that I have in fact gotten my laptop back from the Laptop Doctor but I've been too lazy forgotten to upload the photo. If there is a photo, please don't judge it. It's a bad photo. But a very tasty brownie. C'mon people, you all know what brownies look like!

Disclaimer: Donna Hay (or Donna, as I like to call her) has no idea that I exist. I like to link to her personal website's shopping section to prevent her from suing my butt off for publishing her recipes without her permission. I'm not sure how Copyright works but I like to think this helps, somehow...