The Brilliant Chef: Choccy walnut brownies

I wasn't going to cook anything this weekend but then I decided to cook so I didn't have to do any of my music homework (but I still had to do it later.)

So I decided to cook this chocolate brownie because it tastes really nice. We discovered that even if it doesn't end up looking nice, it can still taste really nice.

Ingredients:

50g self-raising flour

25g plain flour

125g butter or margarine

100g chocolate chips

2 eggs

275g caster sugar

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

2 tablespoons cocoa powder

100g chopped walnuts (or other nuts or raisins, dried cranberries etc).

You will also need a 20cm square cake tin so this will be like a traybake.

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 180 c. Prepare your tin by greasing it (I use a cooking spray as that uses less oil) and line it with a piece of baking paper cut to the right size.

2. Melt the chocolate chips in a glass or metal bowl over a pan of hot water on the hob. Make sure the water is not touching the bottom of the bowl. Be careful not to burn yourself as the bowl will get hot so you will need oven gloves to hold it still while you stir the chocolate.

3. In a mixer, mix together butter or margarine, the sugar and the vanilla extract. You can mix this on quite a high speed using the beater attachment of the mixer. Gently beat the eggs in a bowl and then add in the eggs to the mixer bowl. You can add a teeny bit of the flour if the mixture looks too runny.

4. Weigh the right amount of flour (50g of self raising and 25g plain flour). Stop the mixer while you sift in the flour into the cake mixture you are making. Also sift in the cocoa powder.

5. Then add the melted chocolate chips. Slowly fold the flour, cocoa powder and melted chocolate in. I mixed it by hand but you could use the low setting of the mixer.

6. Finally stir in the chopped nuts.

7. Pour the mixture into the tin trying to make it level.

8. Bake for 30-35 minutes until cooked through.

9. Then leave them to cool in the tin for at least 20 minutes.

10. When the tray bake was cool, I used icing sugar and a stencil to make some shapes on them.

You can make a stencil by cutting out a shape from greaseproof paper

Then sprinkle on some icing sugar through the hole you have cut using a sieve

Voila - Star shapes from icing sugar!

You are supposed to be able to cut the brownies in the tin into pieces to take out. But that's when disaster struck! They were not coming out of the tin, so mummy lifted the whole traybake out of the tin, then we scraped off chunks.

Even though it looked a mess, it tasted really really nice. So we had the broken up pieces of brownie with Ice cream for dessert.

We don't know why it got stuck. Maybe the tin wasn't greased enough even though nowadays we always use the spray oil for greasing and it is fine. Maybe the recipe is too sticky. Maybe lots of other reasons but the main thing is even if it doesn't look perfect it can still taste good.