Anyone who reads my blog often will know, that the majority of time I’m busy sewing and working on Closet Geek. However I do have a huge passion for cooking (especially baking) and it’s rare that I find an excuse to take time off work and do so. This half term, Lily and I have been doing a lot of baking because she’s currently doing a project called Scrumdiddlyumptious at school, which focuses on chocolate. We’re making an A-Z of Chocolate for her project and part of that involves making lots of yummy food! The basic concept of her project is for us to make a page for every letter of the alphabet. Some pages will be information and history about chocolate, while others will be recipes. I think in total we have about twelve dishes we’ll be making, but over half term we made about half that.
This recipe that I’m sharing today is for Mocha Brownies (chocolate and coffee flavour) and they were absolutely delicious! The finished product is very similar to the ones Megan made Minecraft Brownie Blocks with but these are sort of an adult version (I only say that, as some people don’t really like their kids eating/drinking coffee). I however, am addicted to coffee! My Instagram is a constant stream of ice coffee pictures, while my Amazon wishlist is littered with coffee machines, mugs and I even have a bean grinder on there! Anyway, the coffee brownies were a big hit so I decided to share the recipe here on my blog.
Ingredients
– 3 eggs
– 450g sugar (brown is best but white works too)
– 350g plain flour
– 200g cocoa
– 250g chocolate chips
– 1 tbsp instant coffee granules, dissolved in 60ml boiling water (I personally used a coffee pod from
www.gourmesso.co.uk which worked brilliantly and gave a strong intense taste)
– 200ml oil
– ½ tsp salt
– ½ tsp baking powder
– 1 tsp vanilla extract
Method
To start off, it’s always best to preheat oven. This needs to be set at 180 oC (Gas Mark 4). After that you need to grease two square 8 inch tins (or at least that’s what the recipe said, ours was actually longer and rectangular).
In a mixing bowl, whisk together the oil, eggs, coffee, sugar, salt, baking powder and vanilla essence.
Once the mixture is smooth and combined, sift the cocoa and flour into the bowl slowly, stirring as you go.
Next you need to add the chocolate chips (or chopped up chocolate if you prefer chunks) and stir well to make sure they are spread throughout the mixture.
Finally you will need to divide the mixture equally between the two tins. Give them a tap on the counter to level them out and knock out any air bubbles.
Cook in the centre of the oven for 35-40 minutes, until the centre is no longer runny. You may need to stick a knife or skewer into the mixture at various intervals, just to check if the brownie is setting. You’ll know it’s done once the knife or skewer can be stuck into the mixture and comes out pretty much clean of mixture.
Allow to cool and if possible place onto a cooling rack (this isn’t essential so long as you’ve greased the tins well or even used greaseproof paper). Once cool cut into squares and serve.
As I mentioned before, we made several other chocolate items including; chocolate ice cream, ganache, rocky road and even chocolate Yorkshire Pudding. Of course none of these things are vital to this particular recipe, but served together they were pretty amazing. We actually had some friends around on the same evening and we served everyone chocolate Yorkshire Pudding, with brownies, rocky road, ice cream and ganache. There was cream too. Everyone said how amazing it all was and I admit it really was. I’d love to experiment a bit more with the Yorkshire Pudding recipe however as it wasn’t as good as I think it could be. Otherwise though, it was all Scrumdiddlyumptious!