Sara's Brownies

A dear friend, Sara, recently had a baby. She had gestational diabetes which meant she couldn't have any sugar for over 8 months, while she was pregnant. When I went to visit her and her beautiful baby, she had baked up a storm of brownies and cakes!


I begged her for her brownie recipe and made it on the weekend. It was ooey, gooey and completely decadent. She couldn't find baking chocolate and had substituted the cocoa and butter mixture.


Sara's Brownies

4 Eggs
A pinch of salt
1 tsp Vanilla Extract
2 cups Caster Sugar
1 cup All-Purpose Flour + 1/4 tsp Baking Powder, sifted together
12 tbsp Cocoa, sifted + 4 tbsp Butter
1/2 cup Butter
100 g Walnuts

Preheat oven to 180 deg C.

Beat the eggs, salt, vanilla together. Add the cocoa and 4 tbsp butter and beat together. Now mix in the rest of the butter and beat well.

Fold in sugar, flour and baking powder and walnuts. Pour the entire thing into a buttered tray and bake for 30-40 minutes or until a skewer inserted in the center comes out clean.

Brownies

How would you describe a perfect brownie? Chewy, chocolate-y and scrumptious? Then I've found THE perfect brownie at Cooking with Amy. In her words:

In my preferred purist version I don't want them too dense and fudgy and I don't want them too cakey and fluffy.

I couldn't have said it better. I wanted a chewy cocoa brownie.


Perfect Brownies Every Time
(adapted from here)

1/2 cup Butter, melted
3/4 cup Flour
1/4 tsp Salt
1 cup Sugar
2 Eggs
6 tbsp Cocoa
2 tbsp Oil
2 tsp Vanilla Essence

Preheat oven to 180 deg C.

Beat sugar and butter together until well blended and then add the eggs, one at a time. Beat well after each addition until the mixture looks smooth.

Now add the cocoa powder, vanilla essence and the oil. Mix well.

Mix the flour and the salt together. Add about 1/4 cup of the flour mixture at a time and mix well after each addition. At this point you could add about 1/2 a cup of chopped walnuts, but thats optional, and I personally want just the plain fabulous brownie.

Pour the mixture into a greased pan and bake for 20 minutes or so. Remove from oven and let it cool completely for 10 minutes. Slice into squares and serve warm with ice cream.


Life doesn't get much better than this.

Thank you, Amy. My friends and family thank you as well (can you hear the applause and cheers? :-) )

Zebras and Leopards

I've been wanting to try making a Zebra Cake for the longest time. And then I tried it. And then I tried it again. And then again. And again. FOUR times!! Each time, something went wrong - when I fixed that, something else went wrong. And I now know the entire recipe in my head!

Here's my final attempt - and I thought it was pretty good. It's still not perfect - but the reason baffles me.

Zebra Cake
(I followed this recipe exactly)

Here you have the ingredients: Sugar, All-purpose Flour, Milk, Cocoa, Baking Powder, Oil and Eggs.


First beat the sugar and eggs together. Add the milk and oil and continue to blend well. Meanwhile, sift the flour and baking powder. Start adding the flour to the wet ingredients, little by little, until well combined. Do not over beat, and don't let those bubbles form as far as possible. Of course, since I was using a hand whip, the bubbles did form! Divide the dough into halves and add cocoa to one half.


Now comes the important part. In a buttered baking dish (I think you should use a round pan, though I tried both a round and a rectangular and didn't see much difference). First scoop about 3 tbsp or 1 ladle that holds about 3 tbsp of batter in the middle of the pan. Then pour the dark batter in the middle of the original batter. Here you go:

It will look like this when you're done:


Now bake for 40 mts at 180 deg C. And try not to peek, please!


When you cut it, you can see the beautiful stripes! Its really a gorgeous cake. Do you see the holes in mine? That's what happens if you have bubbles! It's still light and moist and delicious, though.



Leopard Cupcakes

Okay, now that we're done with the Zebra, let's move onto the Leopard, shall we? It's just that I had some batter left over from the above process. So I poured two ladlefuls into a muffin tin and baked it (one ladle of the regular batter and one of the cocoa). We got ourselves some spots.


Aren't the felines lovely? :)

My daughter was delighted with her "zoo" dessert! And now that we have stripey zebras and spotted leopards, she requests a giraffe next!