My sister-in-law Rachel makes the best chocolate brownies ever and after I’d put the tin with these chocolate brownies from the The Great British Book of Baking into the oven Jon came across the note I’d made of the quantities of ingredients she uses for her recipe. Too late for this bake but I did use her recommendation of dark chocolate Bournville rather than the high cocoa french dark chocolate I usually use for baking. I haven’t used this recipe book much, it has an excellent range of nice looking bakes which I must try out. These brownies were nice, much better than shop bought and they have nice gooey texture but Rachel’s have the gooey texture with a lovely chocolatey crust contrast.
Ingredients
- 225g unsalted butter, diced
- 100g dark chocolate, broken up
- 200g caster sugar
- 4 large, free range eggs
- 1/2 tsp vanilla essence
- 50g plain flour
- 50g cocoa powder
- a pinch of salt
- 75g walnut pieces
- icing sugar for dusting (optional)
Instructions
- Preheat oven to 180C/350F/Gas 4
- Put the butter ad chocolate into a small heavy based pan. Set over the lowest possible heat and leave to melt gently, stirring frequently until smooth but not hot. Remove pan from the heat and leave to one side until needed.
- Grease and line a 20cm square tin
- Put the sugar, eggs, vanilla essence into a large mixing bowl and mix thoroughly with wire whisk or wooden spoon
- Whisk in the cooled chocolate mixture, sift flour, cocoa and salt into bowl and mix well. Stir in nuts.
- Transfer mixture to tin and spread evenly. Bang tin on a work surface to expel any air bubbles
- Bake in the oven for about 25mins, until a skewer inserted into the centre of the mixture comes out with moist crumbs.
- Stand the tin on a wire cooling rack and leave to cool completely, it will continue to cook in the tin as it cools.
- Cut into 16 squares and dust with icing sugar just before serving.
100 Cook Books 
Awww, this looks so heavenly. yummy! =)