Chocolate Brownies

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a great New Year’s Eve and saw 2013 in with style and plenty of bubbles to drink! We had a lovely evening with our neighbours – nice and relaxed but with lots of good food and good wine before watching all the fireworks across the city from up on the 15th floor of our building (a much better view without all the cold and hassle of fighting the Edinburgh Hogmanay crowds)!

I wanted to make something sweet to have as a dessert that we could eat at any point in the evening and I decided some indulgent chocolate brownies were just the thing! A friend had given me this recipe from the BBC good food site and they had tasted good when he made them so I thought this would be one to try myself.

I’ll let you look at the BBC site for full directions but to make a batch you will need:

• 185g unsalted butter
• 185g good dark chocolate
• 85g plain flour
• 40g cocoa powder
• 50g white chocolate
• 50g milk chocolate
• 3 large eggs
• 275g caster sugar

To quote my friend “They get really excited about the mixing stage” so it’s worth giving the directions a read if you want them to turn out light and gooey as they should be. It’s not as difficult as it sounds, but the key is to keep as much air in the mixture as possible by combining the ingredients in the right order and folding the mix carefully rather than beating it together too vigorously and knocking the life out of it!!

They turned out really well and had the perfect mixture of rich gooey-ness while still being light and were absolutely fab. We devoured most of them as soon as they had cooled with wine and fresh raspberries – heavenly!

So forget the usual New Year’s Resolutions filled with giving things up – they never last and why make yourself miserable!? I have resolved that 2013 is going to be the best year ever filled with excellent food, excellent friends, and a lot more of these brownies!