Birthday brownies

It's Chris' 30th birthday today, and seeing as it's a milestone birthday, I thought I'd bake something for it and give it to him when I see him in the lab tomorrow. I thought I'd try one of those recipes that I'd heard so much about, but never quite got around to trying - Bravetart's brownies. The recipe is as close as I could get it, except (1) there's no vanilla extract, because I just somehow missed it when I was reading the recipe, (2) the instant espresso powder is substituted for ordinary instant coffee, (3) instead of a 9"x13" tin, I used a 9"x9" square tin and a 20cm round tin, (4) everything's scaled up a tiny bit (specifically because I happened to have 200g of chocolate available, and didn't want to have a stupidly small amount left over) and (5) I decided to add some blanched almonds to the pan for half of each tin because who doesn't like nuts in their brownies?!

Bravetart Glossy Fudge Brownies

Ingredients

• 400g Butter
• 200g Dark chocolate
• 530g Granulated/caster sugar
• 65g Brown sugar
• 5g Salt
• 7 Eggs
• 1tsp Instant coffee powder
• 150g Plain flour
• 135g Cocoa powder
• 100g Blanched almonds

Method

1. Brown the butter by heating in a saucepan over medium heat, stirring continuously until the popping stops and the butter is golden yellow and silent.
2. Remove from heat and stir in chopped chocolate.
3. Whisk sugars, salt, eggs and instant coffee in a stand mixer on medium-high speed until extremely thick and fluffy (about 8 minutes).
4. Reduce speed to low and pour in the warm chocolate butter mixture.
5. Add the flour and cocoa powder and mix until combined.
6. Scatter blanched almonds over half of a lined tin.
7. Pour batter tin and bake at 180C for 30 minutes/to internal temp of 96C).
8. Allow to cool before slicing.

100g of blanched almonds is quite a lot when spread over such a small area!

This one is definitely not one that you'd want to do without a stand mixer. Here's the finished batter just before pouring into the tin. The photo doesn't really do justice to quite how dark and rich it looks.

And here they are, ready for the oven!

And straight from the oven - I think they look pretty darned gorgeous!

Time for another classic

It's Fiona's dad's birthday, and it's a milestone birthday this time - so what better time than to try out a classic recipe. I've wanted to give this one a go for a while, so it seemed like a good opportunity. This is a classic Elizabeth David recipe, from French Country Cooking, but countless variations abound online. I tried largely to stick to the actual original Elizabeth David recipe (this version is it, though rather roughly converted to metric), but naturally with a bit of deviation mostly for practical reasons (and also scaled up by 25%).

St Émilion au Chocolat

Ingredients

• 40 Amaretti biscuits*
• Small amount of cognac**
• 140g Butter
• 140g Sugar
• 180ml*** Whole milk
• 1 Egg yolk
• 280g Dark chocolate

Method

1. Arrange a layer of amaretti on the bottom of a small casserole dish and sprinkle with cognac to soak.
2. Cream the butter and sugar together.
3. Scald the milk and allow to cool.
4. Mix the egg yolk into the milk.
5. Melt the chocolate.
6. Mix the milk mixture into the chocolate.
7. Mix the butter and sugar mixture in.
8. Stir until smooth.
9. Cover the amaretti biscuits with the chocolate cream.
10. Arrange another layer of amaretti over the top and sprinkle with cognac again.
11. Cover with the remaining chocolate cream.
12. Decorate with a couple of amaretti biscuits and refrigerate overnight.

*The original recipe calls for "macaroons" (which presumably means either almond macaroons or macarons, as opposed to coconut macaroons). I'm far too lazy to make macaroons though, so I just bought some amaretti biscuits instead (which seems to be both a common, and also quite reasonable substitution). It also only says to use 12-16 of them (but don't forget that I've scaled up by 25%). I suspect the change in dish (you were supposed to use a soufflé dish, but it turns out that I've got nothing that even remotely resembles one) might fundamentally be why I ended up using so many more of them. Or perhaps amaretti biscuits are smaller than the typical macaroon?
**E.D. calls for "a little rum or brandy", so wasn't overly prescriptive about what booze to use.
***E.D.'s recipe specifies "a teacup" of milk, which had me pretty stumped. Happily though, a little bit of searching online eventually brought me to this webpage which has a quote from none other than Elizabeth David herself, saying "English teacups, breakfast cups and coffee cups used as measuring units make sense to us; there could hardly not be a teacup in the house, and, give or take a spoonful, its capacity is always about five ounces; a breakfast cup is seven ounces to eight ounces; a coffee cup is an after-dinner coffee cup, or two and a half ounces". And then at last, trusting Google, we eventually establish that 5oz is 142ml.

Here's the first layer of amaretti, ready to go. I smashed up a couple of biscuits to help fill in the gaps.

I didn't worry about leaving spaces on the second layer though.

And here's the finished article, ready for the fridge!

Edit: I forgot to update this post after having tried it! Well, there's a very good reason why this recipe seems to have quite such a reputation for being great - it really is! I think that the massive increase in the proportion of biscuits was probably a good change to have made, but this was absolutely lovely. It's incredibly decadent and rich - you really wouldn't want to have a big portion in one go - but rather delightful!

Baking freebies

I've never used a shop-bought premade tart case before, but we recently given two of them. I wasn't quite sure what to do with it (or indeed, actually how to use it - like are you supposed to prebake the case before filling it?), but rooting around through the cupboard, I also found a jar of malt extract that I'd been given aaaaages ago, another thing that I wanted to do something with but again, didn't really know how to use it. So what better time than now? I found this very promising looking recipe for a malted chocolate banana tarte tatin, so I'm just following that recipe for the filling and pouring it into the cases.

Malted Chocolate Banana Tart

Ingredients

• 150g Unsalted butter
• 125g Malt extract
• 50g Dark chocolate
• 2 Sweet pastry tart cases (210g each)
• 5 1/2 large, ripe bananas (around 1kg before peeling)*
• Chopped, roasted hazlenuts

Method

1. Heat the butter and malt extract in a frying pan until melted.
2. Turn the heat up to high, bring to a simmer and simmer for about 30 seconds.
3. Remove from the heat and allow to cool slightly.
4. Finely chop the chocolate and stir in the still hot mixture, stirring until smooth.
5. Pour into the tart cases.
6. Peel and slice the bananas lengthways, and arrange cut-side-down on the malt/butter/chocolate mixture.
7. Bake at 200C for ~20 mins.
8. Allow to cool slightly so that the pastry hardens a little before removing from the tray.
9. Sprinkle hazlenuts on top.

*It was supposed to be 6 bananas, but I couldn't quite fit them into the cases!

Here they are about to go into the oven:

And straight out of it:

And a slightly better photo now that they're nearly set. I decided only to add hazlenuts to one of them initially, in case it turned out to be better without them.

As it turns out, the hazlenuts are definitely a good idea.

Overall, it's nice, but not quite as good as I thought it was going to be. I think that it could have done with longer in the oven - where the filling had cooked a bit more and started to caramelize, it turned absolutely lovely. And I'm not convinced that it needed the chocolate at all - I think it might have been more elegant and more interesting without it. But even still, it's pretty tasty!

What to do with egg whites

 In the past, I've normally made a pavlova alongside the tiramisu, to use up the egg whites. But I don't actually like meringue all that much. So this time around, I thought I'd try something a bit different. I found a recipe for an easy chocolate mousse that looked, well, really easy.

Easy Chocolate Mousse

Ingredients

• 150g Dark chocolate
• 6 Egg whites
• 2tbsp Caster sugar

Method

1. Melt the chocolate in the microwave.
2. Whisk the egg whites with the sugar until it forms stiff peaks.
3. Fold the egg whites into the chocolate.
4. Pour into ramekins and refrigerate to set.

Simple, no? Still not quite simple enough for me not to make a bit of a hash of it - I lost a heck of a lot of air in the folding, and I think my chocolate was too cool to begin with and started to set immediately, so I've got flecks throughout. It doesn't look stellar, but it was ridiculously simple.