Sometimes, a very good recipe can emerge from right under your nose…
I’ve spent a lot of hours in the past, searching for the ideal recipe to suit one of many occasions. You see, this recipe for baking brownies was found on the side of a bag of Lidl’s dark brown sugar!
Almost a year ago, I made my first ever brownies using a healthier mix of ingredients. For whatever reason, they didn’t quite turn out as well as I’d hope. Far from being a bad effort, there were less firm than I’d expected.
This time, I left the mayonnaise in the fridge as I dug out the butter, sugar, eggs and other calorific items.
It’s been a while since I’ve done a post about baking, hasn’t it?
This one went really smoothly, as I began by melting the chopped chocolate over a saucepan of simmering water.
I fell in love with the stuff as I later decanted it in to the 230mm cake tin. I started preheating my own at around the same time as I was tackling the final mix of ingredients… That’s the beauty of a halogen oven, you see – being more compact in size, it requires far less time to warm up than a conventional cooker.
This recipe was for light and dark brownies. As Lidl don’t sell anything other than milk or dark chocolate chips, I fortunately had a bar of white chocolate in the cupboard (which has since been replenished, naturally) and was able to chop this up for a fair substitution.
After twenty-six minutes in the oven at 160°C, my cake chocolate brownie was very tough on top but clearly very soft underneath… That recipe suggested it should have been ‘spongey’; I was grateful to be able to later remove it from the tin without too much crumbling away to fall on the floor.
That’s a photo of the underside, where those white chocolate chips clearly show through. I had an urge to eat the lot there and then but, I found with my knife and savaged it up in to a number of smaller sections, before stuffing them in to a Tupperware box – where they would each amalgamate with the next to form considerably larger bites.
I think it’s another one of those situations where I might’ve benefited from lowering the temperature slightly further. Also, I’m once again leaning towards the opinion that a 230mm round tin may be too larger for a 12lt halogen oven, as I have almost always had better results using a 200mm tin, including my very best of successes.
Thanks for reading. I’ve noticed other recipes on the surrounds of various other packages and I’ll be sure to try them out soon.