Bloke's Cookbook - Chocolate Brownies

Blokes tend not to be choc fans. I'm not. Give me a Cornish Pasty, or a steak sandwich. But there's one great advantage with cooking these. The ladies will adore you. Take a box of these into the office on your birthday and they will trill and coo like demented doves.

This recipe is a variation on a Nigella Lawson one. In my opinion, Nigella's brownie recipe is sickly-sweet and there's not enough chocolate. My changes to her recipe boost the amount of dark chocolate in the recipe, and cut the amount of sugar in half. While my variant doesn't have the same thick, gooey centre that hers has, it's a richer flavour.

This will make around 20 brownies which are 2 inches long, 1 inch wide and 1 inch deep (ish). Tweak the recipe to your needs by just increasing or decreasing the amounts in the mix. So long as you keep it in proportion, it'll work.

You will need:

A large, deep brownie or roasting tin;
Two mixing bowls (not plastic);
Baking parchment;
A saucepan.

Ingredients:
250g unsalted butter
400g dark chocolate (70% or higher cocoa content)
4 eggs
Half a vanilla pod (or vanilla extract if you absolutely must)
300g caster sugar
250g plain flour
1 teaspoon salt

Optional:
300g chopped walnuts
300g morello cherries

Firstly, switch the oven on to 180C. Then, melt the chocolate and butter. Burning chocolate is very easy, so here's the traditional way to do it. Take your saucepan, and fill it with water to a depth of around 1 inch. Then, place one of the mixing bowls in the saucepan. Now you can see why the bowl shouldn't be plastic (although I found out that plastic mixing bowls retain some of the stuff you've mixed in them in the plastic, so you should chuck them away and shop for those nice cream-coloured ones with the white inside that your granny had). Make sure the bottom of the mixing bowl doesn't touch the water. Now switch the heat on, put the chocolate and butter in, and let it melt. This will take some time - 20 minutes or so - but you should check it every few minutes or so, and give it a stir. Once it's melted, you'll end up with a mixture of liquid dark chocolate and butter which would give Gillian McKeith an eppy. Make sure you turn the heat off as soon as it's melted enough.

Now, in the second mixing bowl, beat the eggs using a balloon whisk or a fork. Take your vanilla pod and, with a sharp knife, split it down the side. Peel back the edges of the pod. Vanilla seeds are absolutely tiny. Scrape them out of the pod with the edge of the knife and add them to the beaten eggs. Mix them in well, because they have a tendency to clump.

Now add the sugar to the eggs, and beat together very well to give you an eggy sugary mix. Stir in the chocolate and butter goo and mix it together. Finally, measure out and add the flour. You can sieve the flour for added fineness but it doesn't seem to make much difference. Stir everything together and you'll end up with a thick, dark runny brownie mix.

If you want to add walnuts or cherries (or both), this is when you do it. Just stir them in.

Put this to one side, and line the baking tin with baking parchment. This is a pain, but you'll thank me for it. Get the parchment, stretch it over the tin, leaving about 3" more than you'll need on each side. Fit the parchment into the tin - I used a pair of scissors to cut slits in the corners to make it fold neatly.

Finally, pour the brownie mix into the parchment-lined baking tin. Make sure it's levelled out before you put it in the oven.

It'll take between 20 and 30 minutes to cook. To check to see whether it's cooked, take it from the oven, and start to cut it into squares with a knife. If the mixture clings to the knife, it's not quite done and needs a few more minutes.

Once it's cooked, take it from the oven, use the parchment to lift it out onto a flat surface, then cut into squares. Leave it to cool.

With practice you can get from ingredients to brownies in under an hour.