When it comes to desserts, brownies are the ultimate choice for me. I love to eat them and I love to make them. Sadly many store bought brownies fail to live up to the hype and many recipes produce results that fall short of my expectations of cakey and gooey treats.
Then one day I found a recipe titled Best-ever Brownies.
Naturally I was skeptical but I am always up to give it a go. To my surprise the recipe was amazing! The results were dense, fudgy brownies that also had an amazing cakey texture. The next day I made another batch and my friends and family loved them.
Since then I’ve made these brownies more times than I can remember and have passed it along to anyone who plans to make brownies.
Be warned, these treats are decadent (read: full of butter and sugar) but eaten in moderation are the perfect dessert, afternoon snack or, in the case my household, pretty much good to eat whenever.
My recipe tinkers with the original a little – specifically cutting back the sugar a little and using all white chocolate because white chocolate – and as the recipe is from the UK, I’ve included US/Canadian conversions as well to make life a little easier. I’ve tested the conversations and the product perfect brownies every time. I have also included a couple of alternatives to make the recipe a little more health conscious.
Ready? Then here goes…
CHOCOLATE BROWNIES
By Charlie Butler
yield: 16 yummy brownies
What you’ll need:
185g unsalted butter (3/4 of a cup)
185g dark chocolate chips* (1 cup)
85g plain flour (2/3 cup)
40g cocoa powder (around 6 tablespoons)
90g white chocolate chips** (1/2 cup)
3 large eggs
200g golden caster sugar (1 cup)
*for every 28g of dark chocolate you can swap out 22g (or 3 tablespoons) of cocoa powder. This will reduce fat and sugar and produce a brownie that isn’t overly sweet.
**this amount can be reduced, left out entirely or replaced with your choice of nuts and/or dried fruit.
How it’s done:
1. Preheat your oven to 350F. Line a shallow baking tin (an 8×8 tin probably works best) with non-stick parchment paper.
2. Next you want to melt your chocolate together with your butter. Breaking the chocolate into chunks and cubing the butter will make this quicker. You can either use a microwave to do this (give it 20 second blasts, stir and replace until melted), or use the bain marie method of melting it in a bowl over a medium heat, whichever works best for you.
3. Sieve the cocoa powder and flour together in a bowl and set aside for now.
4. In a large mixing box combined the eggs and sugar. You can use a hand whisk if you want to build some extra muscle (and preemptively burn calories) or, as I might recommend, use an electric whisk on full power. If using the latter method it should take somewhere between 3 and 5 minutes. You’ll know when you’re good as the mixture triples in volume and, if you lift your whisk, will leave trails on the surface.
5. Your melted chocolate should be nice and cool by now so pour it into the egg and sugar mixture. Mix them together in gentle figure-8 motions so as not to knock out all of the air from the previous step.
6. Now you want to add the cocoa powder/flour to your chocolate mixture. You can do this a bit at a time and mix, or simply throw it all in at once. Again, you want to use the same figure-8 motion as before and continue until the mixture looks nice and fudgy. Don’t worry if it looks dry at first, it will work out. Scouts honor. Once it’s good, you can add your white chocolate chips (if you’re adding them at all) and mix those in.
7. Pour the mixture into the baking tin and scrape as much mixture as you can from the bowl. Make sure it fills the whole tin which might mean you need to ease the mixture into the corners. In the oven the brownies will take around 25 minutes to bake and when done should have a dry, papery crust on top. You can test they’re done by giving the tin a little shake. If the middle wobbles, they’ll need a little longer so give them five minutes or so and test again.
8. Once the brownies have cooled (if you can wait that long!) you can cut them into equal 16 equal parts.