Gooey Chocolate and Walnut Brownies

Ingredients I used:

200g dark chocolate

180g butter

200g caster sugar

110g plain flour

3 eggs

50g walnuts

LOTS of chocolate chips

I melted the chocolate and butter together (the original recipe said to do this in a bowl over hot water, but who has time for that? I chucked it in a saucepan and made sure to keep stirring - less washing up too!). I then whisked up the sugar and eggs, stirred in the melted chocolate mixture (after it had cooled a bit) and chucked in my walnuts and chocolate chips - but I guess you could use any extras, white chocolate chunks would work well. It all went in the oven on 160 for about an hour - it took a long time to cook as the mixture made quite chunky brownies in my small square cake tin. They were still lovely and soft and fudgey in the middle, so that was good! Flowery flags optional, of course...

The best brownie dessert is a melty warm brownie with a big spoon of ice cream, YUM. 

I want to try melt in the middle chocolate puddings next, I'm not sure how hard it would be. Any recipes? What have you been baking recently?

Golden Syrup Goodness

The last few weeks have been crazy busy getting all of my university work in - the deadline was today and I finally submitted everything! I'm not completely free now - I still have to write my 15,000 word dissertation over the summer. But I have a bit more time for all the things I've been wanting to do.

The first thing I did after handing in all my work today? Made a TREACLE TART!

I've never made one before and the last time I made pastry instead of buying it was when I was at school, so I'm pretty pleased it turned out so well.

I used a recipe from the BBC Food website here. It doesn't require many ingredients at all really.

For the pastry:
225g Plain Flour
110g Butter
1 Egg

Rub in the butter and flour and add the egg, and knead into dough. Blind bake in the oven first for 15 minutes in the tin.

For the filling:
450g Golden Syrup
85g Fresh Breadcrumbs
Pinch of Ground Ginger
2 tbsp Lemon Juice

Just chuck them all in a bowl and mix! Pour in and bake for 30 minutes.

The trickiest bit was the breadcrumbs - I spent ages trying to grate bread to make them until I realised I could put them in a blender. I think next time I might add something else to it to make it more interesting - maybe some walnuts. But for now, super sweet deliciousness is perfect, just what I needed after all the work!

Baking: Strawberry Swiss Roll

I decided to make this after seeing a recipe for a raspberry swiss roll on the BBC Food website, but increased the quantities and changed a couple of things to work with what I had - besides, you can't go wrong with strawberries and cream!

Ingredients:

5 Free-range Eggs
125g Caster Sugar
125g Self-raising Flour
Strawberry Jam - enough to spread over the sponge
300g Double Cream
4-5 Strawberries - and a couple more to decorate
Icing Sugar - a sprinkling to decorate

I whisked the eggs and the sugar, then folded in the flour. I poured the mixture into a large flat tin (although I forgot to grease it, as I discovered later - whoops!) I then baked it in the oven for 10 minutes.

Work in progress... surely this isn't going to work?!

For the filling, I whipped up some double cream - I'd forgotten how long this takes to do by hand, but if you do a tiny bit, then keep adding a tiny bit more cream each time it gets thicker, it is a much easier task! I spread on the strawberry jam first, then added the cream on top, and then tiny pieces of strawberries for some extra sweetness. In hindsight, I think it would have been easier to spread the jam on the cream instead of the other way around - putting the cream on top of the jam was messy and it didn't spread neatly, and I ended up with jammy cream as oppsed to two separate layers, as can be seen in the messy finished article! Another thing I learnt - don't be too generous with the filling, as otherwise it squidges out as the sponge is rolled... less is more! As long as it is rolled when still a bit warm and very carefully, the sponge shouldn't crack.

The finished product!

 Having just cut into it for a slice, it looks a bit neater on the inside, and I can confirm it's pretty tasty too ;)