Recipes

AMAZING BROWNIES

 

(I would love to tell you where this recipe came from, I suspect it was BBC Good Food, but alas the recipe is no longer there so I can't link to it)

 

Ingredients

150g butter (Stork will do but butter is better) (try saying that after a few drinks)

220g dark choc (if you're buying 100g bars then 200g is totally fine, that's what I use. Oh, and this tastes AMAZING even if you use Tesco value 29p chocolate.)
220g caster sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
3 eggs (be ethical and buy free range, go on)
75g plain flour
75g self-raising flour
100g white chocolate (I tend to buy a bag of chocolate drops from the baking section)

100g fresh raspberries (frozen ones could work but I'm not sure...the recipe tastes good even without these)

Preheat fan oven to 180 degrees

1. Melt the butter together with the dark chocolate in the biggest pot you own. (ok, maybe not if you own a pressure cooker style pot, but use a big one)

2. Remove the pot from the heat.

3. Add everything else except from the white chocolate and the raspberries. Feel free to sieve things, but I don't bother.

4. Throw anyone who likes to eat raw cake batter out of the kitchen (you will not get them to stop eating this, if I could get over my fear of eggs I would totally eat this all in one sitting before it was baked)

5. Mix everything with a wooden spoon until it looks er mixed. (DO. NOT. EAT.)

6.Grease a baking tray or line it with greaseproof paper. Or don't, but don't blame me if it gets stuck in the pan (although that would be a great excuse to eat it all straight from the oven)

7. If you didn't grease your tin then leave it a second so it isn't still really hot- otherwise your white chocolate will melt and that will not be cool

8. Mix in the chocolate drops and the raspberries. I try not to  mash the raspberries up too much, but it totally doesn't matter.

9. Pour into that greased baking tray.

10. Throw into the oven. I put them in for about 2o - 30 mins. But then I like my brownies to be totally gooey- if I wanted to make fully cooked brownies I would have followed a cake recipe. Basically take them out when you think they look cooked enough for you. If the top wobbles they're not cooked enough even for me.

 11. Place on a cooling rack. STEP AWAY FROM THE BROWNIES. Seriously.

12. Serve hot with ice cream. Or cold with ice cream. Or cream. Or on their own. Or straight out the tin with a spoon. Can you guess which one of these serving suggestions I followed...?!

 

 

AMAZING CUPCAKE RECIPE

 

This is from the BBC Good Food Website and they've named it 'Romantic Rose Cupcakes'. I go to this every time I need a plain sponge for cupcakes or a round cake. It's so so so so easy, impossible to get wrong and tastes amazing. Until I gave this a go I liked trying varying recipes- but I'm yet to find anything as moist and impressive as this one. Don't be put off by the nuts, you can't taste them, they just keep it nice and soft. It is impossible to make this cake dry, it is just so good! I've made this as a round cake this time because icing so many cupcakes is time consuming, but it looks lovely either way and tastes amazing.

You can access the original recipe here

Ingredients

 150ml natural yogurt (I use Onken's small pot which is 178g or own brand supermarket yogurt. However I never use the excess so I prefer to pay slightly more to buy the smaller pot!)

3 eggs, beaten
1 tsp vanilla essence
175g golden caster sugar
140g self-raising flour
1 tsp baking powder
100g ground almonds
175g unsalted butter (salted is fine too)

                                                                 Method

Turn oven on- fan 170 degrees

1.Add all dry ingredients to a bowl

2. Melt the butter in a pot

3. Mix the vanilla essence, yogurt and eggs in a measuring jug or similar

4. Slowly add the melted butter to the egg mix. This bit is a bit odd, it looks horrible. Don't worry, I've made this many times and the eggs are yet to scramble!

5.Start the mixer, add the buttery eggs over several batches to the mix. 

6. Don't mix it too much, just make sure it isn't lumpy :)

7. Now add this to a 7.5ish inch springform tin or cupcake cases in a muffin tin (you'll get 12 muffin sized or roughly 20 fairy cakes depending on the tin)

8. Bake in the middle of the oven for about 15 - 20 mins. You will know when they're ready- check the colour (golden) and that they're springy to the touch. If you're really worried shove a cocktail stick into one- as long as anything stuck to it is cooked then you're good (the cake mix does tend to stick so it's not the easiest way to tell).

9. Allow to cool

Ice with butter icing made from 140g of both butter and icing sugar and 100g of melted white chocolate. Don't be tempted to miss out the chocolate- I promise they will not be too sweet- the icing compliments the cake batter beautifully. Just make the icing as you would normally then add the melted chocolate at the end. Lovely.