Showing posts with label brownies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label brownies. Show all posts

Tuesday, 11 June 2013

"It's All Relative" Healthy Chocolate Brownies

Quite some time ago I made Chocolate Heartache Cupcakes which used eggplant as a base, and were flour and butter free. They were so incredibly rich and moist and dense that the thought of applying the whole eggplant-as-a-baked-goods-base concept more broadly has been playing on my mind ever since.
 
It was inevetable that my thoughts would turn to inventing a brownie that was (gasp!) healthy. I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to eat brownies, relatively guilt-free?? I carefully crafted the recipe over several days' driving to and from work (50 minutes each way. Why yes, I DO devote a lot of time to thinking about food, why do you ask?) and was finally ready to test it on the guinea pigs at work execute the magnificience that is these brownies. Inevitably I made some changes on the fly to improve the texture, but that was always going to happen.

And lo and behold, these healthy chocolate brownies were born. Relatively healthy, anyhow!
 
INGREDIENTS:
1 medium eggplant
1/2 large zucchini
1 banana
1 block Club chocolate (180g)
2 large dollops honey (it's probably close to 1/4c, but to me it was using a dessert spoon and doing two huge spoonsful)
3tbsp cocoa powder
1 1/2c ground almonds
1tsp vanilla extract
1/2c choc chips
1/2c pecans
 
Prick eggplant all over with a fork and place in a covered dish in the microwave with a little water in the bottom. Steam for 4 minutes. Flip over, and steam for a further four minutes. Allow to cool enough to handle, then chop the top and peel skin off. Mash or blend until relatively smooth and set aside.
 
Grate zucchini. Squeeze as much excess moisture out as possible. Add to eggplant mix.
 
Mash banana. Add to eggplant mix.
 
Melt chocolate. Add to eggplant mix.

Mix in honey, lightly beaten eggs, cocoa powder, almonds and baking powder until you have a consistent mixture.

Transfer mixture into a greased baking dish or tin and bake for about 50mins at 180oC until set.



 
Note that you will likely find it quite difficult not to eat several pieces at once. If I were you I'd do what I did and bring it into work!
 
EDIT: It helps them hold together if you refrigerate them overnight once cool. I cut the lines in before refrigerating, and then just cut over them again before serving. Also, I'm quite sure those are the quantities but the question has now been raised in my mind. When I get home tonight I'll find the envelope I wrote the recipe on and correct if need be!
 
EDIT #2: If you have copied this recipe out before the 23rd of June 2013 then the quantities are are a little out of whack and there are a couple of things missing. Obviously I found the envelope I wrote it on this morning and am editing it accordingly. Sorry if I stuffed up your brownies! Best you try again ;)

Friday, 4 May 2012

Pioneer Woman's Mocha Brownies

Well. I finally did it. After resisting for the longest time due to the crazy amount of butter and sugar in these, I made Pioneer Woman's mocha brownies from her first cookbook.

I just want to say what an absolute hero Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman) is to me. I stumbled upon her blog via Cake Wrecks way back in 2009 (might even have been 2008...) and I haven't looked back. Not only did her buttery recipes appeal to me, but I also became hooked on the story of she and her husband's romance, entitled Black Heels to Tractor Wheels. You can read it on her blog (I'm having trouble finding the whole lot of them - perhaps the category was removed once the book was published? But at least some of the components seem to remain, so search for Black Heels), or buy it in book form. She comes across as being this lovely, sweet, slightly ditzy woman and is totally relatable in so many ways. It's going to sound really twee, but she made me believe in true love when I was doubting it, and she made me feel kinda normal cos hey, I'm a bit of a ditz myself and I share her love for food and family and friends, too. I love you, Ree!

(No... declaring your undying love to a blogger you've never met isn't weird. At all...)

Anyway, enough babble. To the brownies!

I have scribbled this out on the back of a receipt and am transcribing it on my bus ride back up to Barham, so hopefully I wrote it down correctly. Note that I have written the Australian measurements here, and that I have only included a half quantity of the icing as I (accurately) assessed a whole batch to be a bit over the top. If you want the original recipe, buy the book! Your thighs won't thank me, but your heart will sing with joy. There's this amazing recipe for berry cobbler and... oh, just by the dang book already!

BROWNIES

120g dark chocolate
220g butter
2c sugar
4 large eggs
3tsp vanilla extract
1 1/4c plain flour (I used gluten free flour and they turned out wonderfully)

Preheat oven at around 160oC (325F was what the original said - you may wish to check my conversion!)

Melt chocolate, being careful not to burn. Set aside to cool slightly.

Beat butter and sugar until fluffy. Add eggs one at a time and mix until batter is an even consistency.

Drizzle melted choclate into sugar/butter/egg mixture with the mixer still running. Add vanilla and mix. Add flour and mix until just combined.

Spread into greased 8" tin (I also lined it with baking paper coming up two of the sides to make it easier to remove the cooked brownie). Bake for 40-45 minutes until set in the middle (note that I cooked mine for closer to an hour, but I think the thermostat on mum's oven is buggered - I have ordered an oven thermometer and hope this will assist future recipes!).

ICING

110g butter, softened
2 1/2c icing sugar
1/8c cocoa powder
Pinch salt
1 1/2tsp vanilla extract
1/4 - 1/3c brewed coffee, cooled to room temperature
(optional: coffee essence)

Mix all but the coffee until just combined  in the mixer. Then, add a little under 1/4c of the coffee and whip until light and fluffy. If the mix is too stiff then add a little more coffee. I added some coffee essence at the end because I only used instant coffee and the flavour wasn't strong enough for me.

Spread icing on brownie and refrigerate until set. Cut into 16 slices.

Note that if you cut it into 16 slices, I calculated that there are around 540 calories PER SLICE!!! Yes, really. So I cut it into 25 slices and I feel much more comfortable with my decision to eat two in one day :)

Bon appetit!



Sunday, 27 November 2011

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...

Wednesday, 12 January 2011

Fair Trade Toffee Brownies

The other day, just before Grant toddled off to his job in remote WA, I made the exceptionally ill-advised decision to bake a batch of brownies. The intention was good - I always send him away with baked goods, which he then uses as a means to bribe the guys on his work sites. Apparently it works a treat. Buuuut the fact that only 2/3 of the brownie fit into the container I was sending him away with, coupled with the fact that I have a propensity to comfort eat, did not bode well for my waistline.

I don't think I've mentioned it on my blog before (I've been too busy swanning about the South Pacific on a cruise ship - more on that another time), but Grant and I got engaged late last year. If you want to see a picture of the ring, either check out my FB profile picture, or jump on the Michael Wilson website. My ring is the Anise (2nd row, 2nd from the left) and it's GORGEOUS. This is one such instance where beauty is NOT only in the eye of the beholder!

My point is, you'd think that with a wedding less than ten months down the track, I'd be starting to think about trying to look my best for our big day. But no, when I saw yummy toffee brownies in front of me, I kind of went OM NOM NOM NOM NOM. Silly Nessa.

Then again, Grant proposed to me while I was wearing hi-vis and had frizzy hair, so maybe the bar on personal appearance isn't quite so high after all...??

So I thought I'd share the fatness recipe with you. It's from the Fair Trade cookbook, which Grant bought me from the Oxfam shop (in the knowledge that I was into tree-huggery stuff) when we first went a-courting. I am somewhat ashamed to admit it is the first recipe I have cooked from it in all that time, but in my defence, the recipes LOOK more complicated when they have the words "fair trade" in front of every freaking ingredient! And I thought it was only fitting that he should be the beneficiary of the first recipe from the book, and this is one of the only transportable recipes - thus far, most of what I've sent him away with have been from the CWA Biscuits & Slices book Jordana gave me for Christmas a couple of years ago - so there you have it.

I'm actually in my sometimes-home caravan park cabin in Barham and don't have the recipe in front of me, but I will do my very best to remember it for you. I really am winging this... And if it's horribly wrong when I check it, I'll change it.

Obviously you mix it well between each step.

1. Melt 100g dark eating chocolate and 30g (40g??) of butter in a large bowl over boiling water (don't let the water touch the bowl)
2. Mix in (this is where I start to struggle) 230g (???) castor sugar (I remember vaguely wondering whether it equated to 2/3c but then didn't actually bother measuring to verify!)
3. Add 3 eggs, lightly beaten, and mixed with 1tsp vanilla essence (I may be getting this mixed up with a gingerbread recipe I recently made... one had one egg and one had three... but I'm pretty sure I have this the right way around!)
4. Add 300g plain flour, sifted, with 1tsp baking powder mixed in. Mix batter around until fairly smooth and no dry ingredients remain
5. Add 200g (???) chopped pecans
6. Meanwhile (and I'm not sure how you can actually "meanwhile" this, because it requires a fair bit of attention), unwrap an entire packet of Columbines (the recipe called for 205g of "fair trade toffees" and that was my best guess as to the equivalent product), unwrap them, restrain yourself from eating them (SO HARD!!!) and place them in a saucepan on low heat with 300ml of thickened cream. Stir until melted (tip: don't let the Columbines touch the bottom of the pan without cream as a barrier, as I suspect it would burn very quickly)
7. Spread 3/4 of chocolate mix into pan lined with baking paper (the recipe said what I took to be a lamington tin (approx. 20x30cm shallow pan), but when I looked at my lamington tin I just knew it wouldn't hold the batter, so I went for a deeper, square cake tin)
8. Top with 2/3 of Columbine/cream toffee mixture (reserve the rest for decorating - the coconut you see in the photo isn't in the recipe; intead, they melt more dark choc and drizzle the toffee and the melted dark chocolate over the top. Also, the fact I didn't need to re-melt my toffee makes me think that Columbines aren't quite rigid enough, but it tasted great!)
9. Top pan with rest of chocolate mix and bake at 180oC (160oC F.F.) for 40-45 minutes. It's baked when it's firm to the touch
10. Let cool in pan 20 mins then turn onto wire rack (or if you're a dumb-dumb like me, forget about it for an hour... buuuut it only seemed to make it moister!). Decorate when cool (or sooner, if you're impatient, like me!)

Now, hopefully I got the recipe mostly right (the only parts in question are the castor (that's right, people, you should be spelling it with an O!!!) sugar and the flour, but I'm pretty sure the flour is right because I remember getting a bit anal about it with a teaspoon and a set of scales) and it turns out looking something like this:

But then I realised that there was something missing:

That's better.

There's greens on it now!

In the end, I ate the above piece for lunch on the day he left and popped the rest in the freezer... but I look forward to the day I bust 'em out and - I'm told - reheat them with some fudge sauce and a wee bit of vanilla icecream. Yummo spagummo!