BROWNIES FOR A WINDY AUTUMN SUNDAY…

Ever since I watched Nigella’s kitchen episode “Can’t live without”, I believe it was the ninth one, I couldn’t stop thinking about making the brownies from the show. It had the most moist texture, a soft and warm feeling even just looking at the screen, lol. I tried to copy down the recipe as much as I could because I didn’t have the book yet back then. However, I never got a chance to do it and the recipe was forgotten since then…

   Then yesterday I just finished my midterm exam and was so pissed off that the study was totally not worth it. The test was ridiculously different :(. My rommate, who took the same test, suggested we make something with chocolate to “chase the bad luck away” (just a logic of two “chocaholics”, haha). I went over my old collected recipe book and found the brownie recipe again. I decided to make that brownie. And really, the moist, the soft texture just makes me feel so relaxing and joyful. My sister did try to make brownie before but the recipe was not as good. It came out like chocolate cake. It was good, but definitely not brownie, though. For Nigella’s recipe, I added some small twists to the recipe, just a bit, to make it more fancy. Instead of light muscavado, I used brown sugar (demerara sugar – the one that still has sugar cane syrup and is really wet and dark yellow), and used just three fourths of the amount of sugar required. I know!! I have an “Asian sweet tooth”, which means I like sweet, but not too sweet!!! The taste turned out to be perfect that way, pleasantly bitter and lightly sweet. Also, I topped the brownies with sliced almond before baking to make the whole thing look pretty 😀 Even though the cake looks pretty wet on the photo, it isn’t sticky at all, which is what I like, or it’s because my photographing skill is not that great 🙂 The wet part of the cake is the melted chocolate chuck I mixed in with the batter… It keeps the whole cake at a decent moist level that should be in a brownies.

You can find the original recipe on Youtube.

You can also buy her recipe book on Amazon (recommended): Nigella Kitchen: Recipes from the Heart of the Home

And here is my adjusted recipe:

– For the cocoa powder, I found this dark cocoa powder at a bulk store near my place. It seems to be of good quality. I think the darkest cocoa powder should be the best ingredient in making a drooling good brownie. You can also try Hershey cocoa powder, or Godiva’s, for some special occasions, because you know, they are expensive 🙁

– I didn’t have enough milk chocolate chips so I added a bit of dark and white chips to substitute for that. It turned out pretty good. You can also try half dark and half white to make marble brownies. It should look good.
– Remember to heat the butter and sugar until most of the sugar melts, so it will make a good liquid base to mix in dry ingredients. Also, it will help the chocolate chips melt later when you mix them in. The melted but not totally incorporated chocolate chips are the key to keep the brownie moist but not greasy and wet.
– The cake will inflate to double the thickness during the time in the oven but will deflate a lil bit in the center after taken out of the oven. This is normal for brownie, so no worries about that.
– For a batter of 5cm thick, the baking time is 20 minutes. However, if the mold is larger and the batter is around 3cm thick, you should only bake for 15 munites. Overbaked brownies will turn into chocolate cakes, which is dry and fluffy. Sometimes the cake can be burned and turns hard if overbaked.

– The almond flakes is optional. You can also use sunflower seeds or other sliced or crushed nuts.
– Also, the brownie will dry out pretty quick in dry weather. A good way to prevent it is to cut them into pieaces and wrap with plastic wrap to keep the moist. Remember to do that after the cake is cool enough to handle.