In the Brownies

Here's one we prepared earlier....

A measure of my day seems to be what I can produce in the kitchen. My 3 year old daughter has an eerie knack of smashing an egg to smithereens and being able to seperate the egg from the shell without getting any shell in with the egg ~ it's like some spectacular illusion when she does it, every egg crack should come with its own round of applause. Hunting this morning I found the perfect recipe (the Green & Blacks chocolate cookbook) where Daisy would be kept busy for a good hour completing every stage of preperation (with help) and I had all the ingredients.

Pre-heat oven to about 180 C

300g chocolate melted in bain-marie with
250g unsalted butter meanwhile

beat 5 eggs, 450g golden caster sugar (I put cut up vanilla pods in mine) and a 1tsp vanilla essence and the seeds of 1 vanilla pod.

add the melted butter/chocolate and mix well

finally sift 200g plain flour and 1tsp salt into the mix and mix well along with some crushed walnuts or assorted dried fruit according to taste, then pour into greased and lined baking tray (c.37cm x 25cm ~ about 2-3cm s thick) and put in oven.

after 20 minutes a crust should have formed ~ if this has started cracking it is ready to take out to allow to cool - always err on the side of slightly undercooked as the residual heat will finish off baking the cake and brownies are best a bit squidgy in the middle. Dust with icing sugar/cocoa powder and eat lots...

I hope you give this recipe a go and end up with the same self satisfied glow that I enjoyed today.