Easy Chocolate Brownies
Guest Author Ben Dillon of Harry’s Rocky Road shares one of his favourite recipes – Chocolate Brownies. Do let us know if you make these and if you’d like to see more recipes!
To make twelve of these decent sized brownies you will need:
- 140g unsalted butter
- 200g dark chocolate
- 200g light muscovado sugar or brown sugar
- 2 tsp vanilla extract
- Pinch of salt
- 3 eggs
- 85g plain flour
- 75g walnuts, lightly toasted, chopped
- Sifted cocoa powder or icing sugar, to dust
Preheat the oven to 160°C. Grease and line the base of an 18cm square cake pan. Place the butter and chocolate in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water (don’t let the bowl touch water). When butter and chocolate have melted – making a gorgeously shiny smooth mix – remove from heat and allow to cool slightly.
Beat with a wooden spoon the sugar, vanilla and a good pinch of salt into the chocolate/butter mixture. Beat in the eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition, and then add flour, beating until smooth. Now you should have a thick, rich looking mix that makes you want to eat it straight from the bowl. But don’t do that.
Fold in the walnuts and pour the thick, rich mixture into the pan, smoothing the top. Bake for 40 minutes or until a skewer comes out with a few moist crumbs attached (not sticky batter). Allow to cool, then turn onto a wire rack and peel off lining paper. Eat straight from the tin with a spoon… Or cut into 12 neat squares and dust with cocoa powder or icing sugar before serving… Or Ice Cream or Whipped Cream…
These Brownies will keep for 2-3 days in an airtight container in the fridge or they can be frozen for up to 2 months – if they will last that long. This is a pretty hardy recipe – one that you can experiment with to suit your own taste buds – leave out the walnuts – add in dried cranberries or white chocolate chips or hazelnuts or milk chocolate chunks or coffee beans or I could go on forever.
But what suits my taste buds you ask? On my second go at this recipe, I went for Lindt Excellence 70% Dark Chocolate to make a wicked Brownie mix and replaced the nuts with cut up chunks of Lindt Excellence Coffee Intense – mmm…
Posted by Dom on 25 Apr 2009 at 10:04 AM
| 10 Comments
Filed in Recipes under brownies, recipe
April 25, 2009 : 2:06pm
Suggestion / request: Can we have a printer-friendly version of the recipe? An attachment in PDF form, perhaps?
April 25, 2009 : 3:44pm
Try just printing it now. It should be very printer friendly.
April 25, 2009 : 4:34pm
Waaaw! Thank you. Will def be trying this and yes please to lots more choccy recipes.
April 26, 2009 : 2:07am
Hey Ben, is this going to be part of your new range ?
April 26, 2009 : 7:04am
Kath – sticking to Rocky Road for my range, just like cooking… With chocolate :)
I’d love to know if people make these and if you put your own spin to it.
April 29, 2009 : 10:43am
I love brownies. I’ll try these on the weekend.
June 2, 2009 : 4:10pm
Made this recipe, with a couple of adjustments (didn’t have enough dark choc so made up difference with little bit of milk choc). Added choc chips instead of nuts as family don’t like them. Made cake, such a success hubby took me shopping next day to buy more ingredients and is now a family favourite.
Definately more recipes please, this was the perfect template to adjust to suit personal/family tastes
June 29, 2009 : 9:26pm
Are there any other recipes you would recommend to do because I am working on a project on different ways of using chocolate but can’t seem to find different recipes to match. Ben would you please help me out?
February 13, 2010 : 4:30am
Fantastic recipe! Just made it, using Whittakers 72% extra dark (Whittakers is one of the best things about living in NZ), and a punnet of raspberries instead of the walnuts. I also added fragments of Lindt Excellence Chilli Intense (about a third of a bar, beaten into pieces with a rolling pin – excellent stress-relief after a tough week), but couldn’t really taste the chilli in the piece I had. Maybe in the next piece, but I’d probably better not have another until after dinner!
March 15, 2010 : 10:19am
This looks legendary. Can’t wait to make some for my boyfriend! yippeee!!