Brownies

Simply because sometimes brownies is exactly what a family needs. Especially when there are five hungry children to feed.

These brownies are less of the goo&crunch variety, more of the dense&rich type.

Scrumdidliiumptious.

Cake Count :: 574

Baking in miniature {revisited}

As it happens, my plans to bake 2010 cakes managed to take a hurtle forward towards looking slighttly more achieveable than when the idea was first conceived, when I got a call from a friend asking me to bake for an event our church was holding.

It also happens that I have done a fair bit of baking since then, so to save repeating myself, and to try and get up to speed on this little blog before I do any more baking, I'm afraid I'm going to cheat and give you a link back to my initial post over on my other blog to give you a bit more of a review of what I baked.

(The brownies featured at the top are the miniature version of the brownies I presented in the last post.)

Cake count :: 454

Birthday Brownies

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It turns out I have a lot of friends who were born in January.

So, second birthday baking opportunity came around very quickly, thanks to Ben being born 18 years ago this month.

I have to say I was slightly cheeky in that I used the Birthday Brownie Baking session (don't you just love alliteration?!) to have a trial run for my mammoth baking session that was to happen later the following week.

I needed to work out how many miniature mouthfuls of brownie goodness the recipe would make, so doubled the quantities and made half of the mixture into Ben's Birthday Brownies and half into bitesize brownies. (Ben, I'm sorry you never saw these, they were eager to be eaten up by five hungry children.)

Result?
12 fairy cake-size brownies
30-odd bitesize brownies (a slight downfall in this Bake2010 plan could be my inaccuracy in counting...)

As a little treat, why don't you whip up some of these little ones for yourself and your loved ones? They're wonderfully quick...

Birthday Brownies :: from Cupcake Heaven by Susannah Blake

Ingredients
75g dark chocolate, 70% cocoa solids (I always use Divine - I like knowing my cakes are ethical)
75g unsalted butter
1 egg
75g caster sugar
25g self raising flour
50g macadamia nuts (optional - personally I prefer my brownies without nuts)

Method
Preheat the oven to 180C / Gas mark 4.

1:: Melt the chocolate and butter in a glass bowl over a pan of simmering water, or in the microwave on medium heat, stirring every 30 secs for a couple of minutes until melted.

2:: Remove from the heat and leave to cool for 5 minutes

3:: Beat in the egg then stir in the sugar. (The quantity of ingredients is so small that you can do this all by hand very easily.)

4:: Sift in the flour and fold in using a metal spoon. Then stir in the nuts, if using.

5:: Spoon the mixture into small cupcake cases or muffin cases if you'd like bigger brownies. The quantity will yield about 6-8 large cupcakes and 12 small, off the top of my head, so give or take a bit with that!
Alternatively, put mixture into a measuring jug with a spout and pour into petit four cases for miniature brownies.
If making miniatures, I just place the petit four cases onto a baking tray.

6:: Bake for 15 - 17 mins until the tops have a cracked appearance and is just firm to the touch.
If making larger brownies, they'll need a slightly longer cooking time, but not too much longer, as in, just a few minutes.

7:: Remove from the oven and leave to cool on a wire cooling rack.

I'll try to give slightly more precise timings at some point - sorry for the vagueness of it!

So there you have it. A slight deviation from birthday cupcakes, but no less delicious!

Cake Count :: 54