Christmas Brownies

Just over a year ago, I made a large batch of chocolate and sour cherry mincemeat. With it, I made normal mince pies and these mincemeat Eccles cakes. However the sheer quantity I made meant I still had two big jars left this year. It's not a big deal, as it keeps, but I do want to get through it so I can try something new, although that probably won't be till Christmas 2016 now!

I've thought about making brownies with mincemeat before, hadn't got around to it until yesterday. I thought they were really good, and you could use your own homemade or shop bought mincemeat- no need to make the chocolate and sour cherry one. I do like the cherries with the chocolate though.

There were a few changes I made from the basic brownie recipe I use. Because the mincemeat is sweet, I reduced the sugar down to a mere half kilo. I also used the juice of half a large orange in the brownie mix. Possibly because of the mincemeat, I found this took longer to cook than normal, just over an hour, and I had to cover them with foil mid-bake t stop them from getting too dark. Finally, I wouldn't usually bother, but as these are Christmas brownies, I gave them a  snowy dusting of icing sugar.

These would be nice for a pudding, especially if slightly warm- I would serve them with some lightly whipped cream to which I had added a slug of Cointreau or Grand Marnier.

Ingredients
200 grams butter
200 grams plain chocolate
500 grams caster sugar
4 eggs, large
250 grams plain flour
4 tablespoons cocoa
350g mincemeat


Method
Preheat oven to 180C, Gas 4
Prepare a small rectangular roasting tin or oven proof dish approximately 8 x 12" (20x30cm). Melt the butter and chocolate over a pan of simmering water. Cool slightly. Stir in the sugar and juice from the cherry jar.Add the eggs, one at a time, stirring until well blended each time.
Add the flour and cocoa and beat for about 1 minute, until smooth. Fold in the cherries. Pour into prepared tin, and bake for about 1 hour, covering with foil if it starts to look too dark. The mixture needs to be just cooked, so start testing with a cocktail stick at about 40 minutes - it should have moist crumbs, but not wet batter, still clinging to it.
Cool in tin until cool enough to handle, then turn out and leave until completely cold before cutting into squares.

Dan Lepard's Chestnut Chocolate Cream Biscuits

I love cooking with chestnuts, there is something about their sweet, mealy texture that really appeals to me. I tend to use them in savoury dishes- paired with a ripe gorgonzola in a oozy risotto, or with pasta, caramelised onions, sauagemeat and wholegrain mustard for a bolstering winter dinner. Almost all of the time I go down the lazy route, and buy them ready cooked and vacuum packed; usually by the good people at Merchant Gourmet. Tesco were getting rid of their Christmas stock of the aforemented lazy cook's chestnuts for £1 a box, so I now have a good stock of them in my cupboard.

 I came across this recipe by Dan Lepard from searching for something sweeter to do with chestnuts. These biscuits are so rich and indulgent, I think you could serve them as a pudding, and it wouldn't be a disappointment to anybody. On the other hand, they make an afternoon cup of tea very special indeed.

Before baking

Just out of the oven

Freshly filled

A few notes about cooking these:

I forgot to dust the biscuits with cocoa before baking. Nothing disastrous happened. I decided to sieve over the cocoa powder after they were baked and assembled instead.

I was eager to try a biscuit straight after assembling them but found the chocolate filling oozed out everywhere. It was messy and delicious, but you can have a far neater experience if you let the biscuits sit for an hour after filling them. The chocolate cream firms up substantially to a far more manageable texture.

This recipe has inspired further ideas for me- possibly making the chestnut biscuits without the cream, and serving with some baked or poached fruit. Plums, pears or quinces, perhaps, to end an autumnal dinner. I also link the idea of using the dough as a the pastry for a tart- perhaps with the fruit suggested before, or a rich chocolatey filling.

Toblerone Fridge Cake

I'm a big fan of Felicity Cloake's 'How to cook the perfect...' series. Felicity has my dream job, refining recipes to perfection and writing about it. Her final recipes are great- at least the ones I have made are, but I trust the other recipes are equally good. 

One of her recipes is for the perfect fridge cake. It doesn't use Toblerone, but I had a large bar at home, and after making Nigel Slater's Toblerone sauce for ice cream, I was keen to use it in other recipes. Felicity's recipe calls for half milk, half dark chocolate, which easily could be aped with a mix of dark and milk Toblerone bars. I just used milk because it is what I had at home, but perhaps the recipe could be bettered with the substitution of dark Toblerone for some of the milk. I did enjoy it as it was though, but I do have quite a sweet tooth. 

The overall flavour wasn't especially Toblerone-like, but it did have the added bonus of nougat pieces peppered throughout. The next time I make it I may use honey in the place of the golden syrup, and add a tiny drop of almond essence to boost the flavour

I omitted the 50g of candied peel, as I don't like it much, and made up the weight with some extra dried fruit. My choice of dried fruit was 70g dried apricots, 70g dried cherries, 70g dried cranberries and 40g sultanas. I only used the sultanas to make up the weight of the dried fruit, but actually I am glad I used them- the cherries and cranberries are so tangy, it was nice to have a more mellow fruit. I decided not to do the grown up option of soaking the fruit in alcohol, and stuck to orange juice. To be honest, a boozy hit isn't what I fancy in a piece of fridge cake, I prefer to save that for puddings rather than have it in my mid morning treat.

For the nuts, I used a half and half mix of pecans and almonds. I think for a Toblerone fridge cake you need to include some almonds to match the nougat in the chocolate. Macadamia strike me as a nice, but pricey addition. 

I was interested to see how little golden syrup she used- only one tablespoon compared to 4 tbsp in my other favourite fridge cake recipe. Also, using an egg in fridge cake seemed odd to me, but the resulting texture was perfect.  

I have copied the recipe with my notes added:

200g of your favourite dried fruit, chopped into raisin-sized bits- I used 70g dried apricots, 70g dried cherries, 70g dried cranberries and 40g sultanas
150ml orange juice (or rum, whisky or Cointreau for grown-ups)- just orange juice for me- I didn't measure, just used the juice of 1 large orange
200g digestive biscuits
150g dark chocolate- dark and milk chocolate replaced with 300g milk chocolate Toblerone
150g milk chocolate- see above
120g butter, at room temperature
1tbsp golden syrup
1 egg yolk
50g mixed peel- omitted, weight made up with additional dried fruit
100g flaked almonds or other nuts, chopped- I used 50g pecans and 50g blanched almonds

Put the chopped fruit into a small pan along with the juice or alcohol and heat very gently until the fruit becomes plump and squishy, and has absorbed most of the liquid. Set aside to cool. Break the biscuits into small pieces.

Line a roughly 20cm square brownie tin with baking paper (you can use a little butter to stick it down at the corners).

Break the chocolate into pieces by whacking the sealed packets against the kitchen counter. Put a heatproof bowl above, but not touching, a pan of water and bring to the boil. Tip the chocolate into the bowl, turn down the heat, and stir until the chocolate has melted. Take off the heat and allow to cool slightly.

At this point I toasted the pecans and almonds in a dry frying pan, and let cool before chopping. The toasted flavour of the nuts was lost in the finished cake, so I probably wouldn't do this next time. 

Meanwhile, put the butter in a large mixing bowl with the syrup and use a wooden spoon, or electric beater, to beat them together until they're soft and a bit fluffy. Add the egg and mix in well.

At this point I drained the dried fruit, so the so the orange juice that wasn't absorbed didn't change the texture of the cake. 

Beat the chocolate into the butter mixture, then tip in the rest of the ingredients and stir until they're all coated with chocolate.

Spoon the mixture into your baking tin and press down firmly with a wooden spoon to make it as flat as possible.

Put in the fridge for a few hours until it has set solid, then lift the paper out, and cut into squares with a sharp knife.

Store in an airtight container in the fridge.

Xiangqi Birthday Cake

Jane Asher cake decoration isn't my thing- I can't draw in pen, let alone in icing. Sometimes I forget this on the run up to birthdays and attempt to make cakes that look like something that isn't a cake, and it ends badly. Last week I had the idea of making a board game themed cake for a friend who collects board games.  As is usual, I thought of all sorts of impossible (for me) ideas. Once the mini-madness passed, I settled on decorating a cake like the red general piece from xiangqi- Chinese chess, using chocolate drops instead of icing. Much more do-able, and it made me feel ever so competent.
The cake recipe I used was this one. This is THE chocolate cake, I rarely make any other. I upped the coffee very slightly to suit the birthday girl's tastes a little more- she's a more sophisticated person than myself.

Cheesecake Marbled Brownies

There is no denying that these are very rich, but somehow the contrast between the intense chocolate and smooth cheesecake batter makes it less so. Originally I was going to make a marbled brownie with a blondie batter for the contrast, but I came across this recipe from the Smitten Kitten website and was rather taken with it.
I didn't change the recipe this time, as I have never made it before, and wanted to see how it turned out.

Before baking...

...and after

This is the third brownie recipe I have blogged, so I now have a label devoted to them, which pleases me greatly.

Totally Chocolatey Chocolate Chip Cookies

I  didn't just make this recipe purely because of the name, I was already going to make some sort of cookie to bring to a friend's house. But the name did make it stand out from many, many cookie recipes that the internet offers- wouldn't you want to see if it lived up to its title?
It turns out they do, they're the type of cookie that demands a glass of milk alongside to cut through the richness. They're also very easy and you can freeze them unbaked but shaped, ready to go for cookie emergencies.
In Nigella's book, she makes 12 cookies out of the dough. I made slightly smaller ones and made 18, so I cut the baking time from 18 minutes to 16. I thought my reduced size were still big, especially for something so rich, I don't think I'd want to make them any larger.

Ingredients
125g dark chocolate, broken into small pieces
150g plain flour
30g cocoa
1 tsp bicarbonate of soda
1/2 tsp salt
125g soft butter
50g caster sugar
75g soft brown sugar
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 egg, fridge-cold
350g chocolate chips (the recipe stated dark, I used milk out of preference)


Method 
Preheat the oven to 170C, and line a baking sheet (I needed two baking sheets). Melt the dark chocolate, and set aside to cool slightly. Mix together the flour, cocoa, bicarbonate of soda and salt. In a mixing bowl, beat the butter and sugars together, then add the vanilla extract and egg, and then the melted chocolate. Mix in the dry ingredients, and finally the chocolate chips. Form them into balls- I did this by taking a two tablespoons, taking a spoonful of dough, and scraping it between the two spoons until a got something roughly spherical. This is technically 'quenelling', but that sounds far too pretentious for making cookies. Place on your baking sheet about 6cm apart. Don't flatten them, they will spread as they cook. Bake for 16-18 minutes. They will be soft when they come out of the oven but will firm up as they cool.

Nutella Brownies

This almost, but not quite, tips the balance from utter decadence to overindulgence. It's also an easy recipe to make, you have the satisfaction of spooning an entire 400 gram tub of Nutella into a pan of melted chocolate and butter, plus an almost empty Nutella jar to clean out with a spoon or your fingers. They'd make a lovely pudding even for ending a fairly elegant meal, just call them Gianduja Brownies and serve them with good quality vanilla ice cream and toasted chopped hazelnuts.


Ingredients
200 grams butter
200 grams plain chocolate
400 gram jar Nutella
500 grams caster sugar
4 eggs, large
2 tbsp Frangelico or 1 tbsp vanilla essence
250 grams plain flour
4 tablespoons cocoa
.


Method
Preheat oven to 180C, Gas 4
Prepare a small rectangular roasting tin or oven proof dish approximately 8 x 12" (20x30cm). Melt the butter and chocolate over a pan of simmering water. Beat in the Nutella, then allow to cool slightly. Stir in the sugar and Frangelico or vanilla essence.Add the eggs, one at a time, stirring until well blended each time.
Add the flour and cocoa and beat for about 1 minute, until smooth. Pour into prepared tin, and bake for about 40 - 50 minutes. The mixture needs to be just cooked, so start testing with a cocktail stick at about 35 minutes - it should have moist crumbs, but not wet batter, still clinging to it.
Cool in tin until cool enough to handle, then turn out and leave until completely cold before cutting into squares.

Sour Cherry Brownies

Fruit and chocolate is a combination I'm not usually a fan of. The texture of most fruits, I feel, clashes horribly with the chocolate's, most of all in the of case the unreasonably popular chocolate-coated strawberries. Dried fruit works better, and banana I quite like, but generally I'll avoid recipes that suggest mixing the two. So why this recipe? Well, the gooey consistency of the brownies melds well with the cherries, and the sour cherries are strongly flavoured enough to withstand the dark intensity of the chocolate. The cherries come from a jar, unless you grow your own or know somebody who does, fresh sour cherries are hard to come by in the UK. I add the juice from the jar to the brownie batter, but if you have some Kirsch knocking around, that would be an excellent addition too.
If you want to make plain brownies, leave out the cherries and substitute vanilla essence for the juice. The basic brownie recipe comes by way of Sue-L, a poster on the BBC Food Messageboard.


Ingredients
200 grams butter
200 grams plain chocolate
600 grams caster sugar
4 eggs, large
250 grams plain flour
4 tablespoons cocoa
200 grams bottled sour cherries, plus 3 tbsp of the juice.


Method
Preheat oven to 180C, Gas 4
Prepare a small rectangular roasting tin or oven proof dish approximately 8 x 12" (20x30cm). Melt the butter and chocolate over a pan of simmering water. Cool slightly. Stir in the sugar and juice from the cherry jar.Add the eggs, one at a time, stirring until well blended each time.
Add the flour and cocoa and beat for about 1 minute, until smooth. Fold in the cherries. Pour into prepared tin, and bake for about 40 - 50 minutes. The mixture needs to be just cooked, so start testing with a cocktail stick at about 35 minutes - it should have moist crumbs, but not wet batter, still clinging to it.
Cool in tin until cool enough to handle, then turn out and leave until completely cold before cutting into squares.

Nutella Buns

This is a variant of the Norwegian Cinnamon Buns that I have previously written about. I thought Nutella would be good in place of the cinnamon butter, and it was. Admittedly, adding Nutella to baked goods will never be that much of a risk. I also added chopped, toasted hazelnuts. You can either buy them whole, like I did, or ready chopped. The whole ones taste nicer, but you do have to resign yourself to extra effort and the inevitability of the odd nut ricocheting off your chopping board.
I left my roasting pan at a friend's house when I brought round a batch of the cinnamon rolls, so I had to do this one free-form on a baking sheet. I quite like it- it looks like a tortoise's shell.  I have shamelessly copied and pasted the majority of the original recipe, as it's basically the same. 

Ingredients
For the dough:
600 g flour (I added some extra flour as the dough was too sticky)
100 g sugar
½ tsp salt
3 sachets easy-blend yeast. (This seems like a ridiculous amount, but butter and eggs have a slowing effect on yeast growth, so go with it.)
100 g butter
400 ml milk
2 eggs

For the filling:
1 jar Nutella
75 g hazelnuts, chopped (see above)

Line the bottom and sides of  a roasting tin (or baking sheet!) approximately 33cm x 24cm or large brownie tin. Combine the flour, sugar, salt, and yeast in a large bowl. Melt the butter and whisk it into milk and eggs, then stir it into the flour mixture. Mix to combine and then knead the dough either by hand or using the dough hook of a food mixer until its smooth and springy-add extra flour until the dough becomes a good rolling consistency. Form into a ball, place in an oiled bowl, cover with clingfilm and leave it to rise for about 25 minutes.

While the dough is rising, toast the chopped hazelnuts in dry frying pan, i.e. no oil, until golden and they release their scent. Take one-third of the dough and roll it or stretch it to fit your tin; this will form the bottom of each bun when it has cooked. Roll out the rest of the dough on a lightly floured surface, aiming to get a rectangle of roughly 50x25cm. Spread the rectangle with Nutella, sprinkle the nuts over evenly and then roll up into a sausage.

Cut the roll into 2 cm slices which should make about 20 rounds. Sit the rounds in lines on top of the dough in the tin, swirly cut-side up. Don’t worry if they don’t fit snugly together as they will swell and become puffy when they prove. Brush them with egg and let them rise again for about 15 minutes to let them get duly puffy.

Heat the oven to 200 degrees Centigrade. Put in the hot oven and cook for 20-25 minutes till golden brown.