Squidgy chocolate brownies

One of my favourite, most popular, and most frequent things to bake is chocolate brownies. I love them, Steve loves them, and everyone else who tries them loves them. These chocolate brownies are rich and squidgy, with an excellent crack on the top, plenty of moistness, and real chocolateyness.

I added white chocolate chunks to this batch, to make them a bit special. I made them for our recent day out at Rockingham, to watch the British Touring Car Championship, with Steve, his brother, and my brother. They went down a treat! I love to people watch, and I was amazed by the amount of burgers, pizzas, hot dogs, and other meat-related things were being scoffed at the event - at 9am! Nothing could beat these brownies.

200g dark chocolate - I use a 75% cocoa bar
175g butter
325g caster sugar
130g plain flour
3 eggs, beaten
100g white chocolate (I used good ol' Milkybar)

Preheat the oven to 170C (160C fan oven).
Melt the chocolate and butter over a pan of simmering water until all melted and smooth. Remove from the heat and allow to cool a little.
Add the chocolate and butter mix to the sugar, and mix, but don't overwork.
Sift in the flour and stir, but again don't overwork.
Add the beaten eggs and mix, but be careful - if you mix for too long, it will start to look a bit weird and may separate a bit. Be gentle.
Chop the white chocolate into chunks - I found half a square to be a good size chunk - any smaller and they melt a little while being cooked, while half a chunk stays chunky. Stir into the mix.
Pour into a prepared baking tray. Bake for about 35 minutes. The top needs to feel hard and crisp, but don't use a skewer, as it will seem undone - but you want it to be squidgy.

Allow to cool in the tin. To serve, slice into squares, and dust with icing sugar.

For Christmas, I'm planning to try orange-flavoured chocolate with dried cranberries :) 

Fruit cake therapy

Tonight's bakes were a fruit loaf and chocolate brownies. I like the pun I made in the headline there - fruit cake as therapy, and also therapy for a fruit cake, aka me... Ha! Made a joke...

The cakes are for my uncle's funeral, on Friday. He sadly died just over a week ago. My aunt is hosting the wake at her house so I thought a couple of bakes would help her out. I chose a traditional fruit loaf, which my uncle would have loved, and my favourite chocolate brownies for more contemporary tastes.

Simple fruit loaf

The fruit loaf was a Great British Bake Off recipe, from the second book. A very simple recipe, although I'm very worried about the results as this was the first time of cake baking for the oven in my new house! I still haven't got to grips with it yet and am unsure about how it will do with cakes. The proof is in the pudding....and the cake.

175g butter
150g caster sugar (I only had golden caster sugar in the house, so I wonder what difference it will make)
400g plain flour
Pinch salt
4 tsps baking powder
300g luxury dried fruit
125ml milk
2 eggs

Loaf tin is meant to be 900g (about 26 x 12.5 x 7.5cm) but mine isn't that big (I really must buy a new one) - so I ended up with some small fruit cakes too.

Melt the sugar and butter. Sift the flour, salt, and baking powder together and stir in the fruit. Beat the eggs into the milk and mix into the flour. Add the melted butter and stir until all combined. In the right loaf tin, bake this at 180C for about an hour - but as I had a smaller tin, it only took about 45 minutes.

The chocolate brownies are a favourite recipe that I make frequently. Again this was the first time of baking in the new oven. They don't look quite right - they don't have the lovely crack across the top like normal, but I hope they're OK. It takes a bit of trial and error with a new oven, I know. Especially when the oven has no light, and no digits on the buttons so I don't know what anything does....

It was good to do some baking. I put my generic mp3 player on random and enjoyed some music while the baking took my mind off everything else. Baking really is therapy.

I can't wait for the Stamford Clandestine Cake Club meet in a couple of weeks. Numbers are slowly increasing - luckily it is looking sure that I won't be sitting in the corner by myself with a cake....

Cake Club success!

The first meeting of the Market Deeping Cake Club was a resounding success!

There were 7 members altogether, and hopefully more will join as the group gains momentum. To put it simply, we baked cakes, took cakes to the pub, ate cakes, talked about cakes, and took cakes home. The perfect sort of club...

Rhubarb & lemon curd cake

The first meeting's theme was 'Step into Spring'. There was lemon drizzle cake, spiced apple & raisin cake with a pastry base, vanilla sponge with chocolate buttercream, blueberry and lemon bundt cake, chocolate cake, and orange cake... Oh, and my rhubarb and lemon curd cake. All delicious! We sampled each cake in turn, just a small piece of each (so that we didn't all roll out of the pub and gain a stone in weight during that hour and a half...)

It was great to meet some really different people, a mix of ages, backgrounds, and interests, but to all have this one yummy thing in common. There was a variety of cake textures, flavours, and styles, and it was inspiring to hear how other people baked, the problems they come up against, and the ideas and advice they had about new approaches and problematic areas I talked about.

Me & my cake

I felt confident to talk about something I was passionate about, even though I didn't know these people... Never having been part of a group or club before, I was incredibly nervous beforehand. Nervous about the cake, nervous about my 'performance', worried about what people would think of me. But in the end, everyone was so friendly and approachable, and accepted me as a fellow baker - just as I accepted them in the same way. It was refreshing, to say the least, and I felt happy to share my enjoyment of something as simple as cake.

But cake isn't always just 'simple' - neither in terms of the science behind the bake, nor the emotional attachment I and other people have with baking. For me, baking calms me, gives me a sense of purpose, gives me something to learn and create, and a product to be proud of.

My rhubarb & lemon curd cake went down well. I was more worried about this one cake than any other (except, perhaps, the Christening cake for my godson, George). It was different to what I normally bake, as I haven't often cooked using fruit. Such a wet and unpredictable fruit as rhubarb certainly created a nervousness and critical element in my mind. But it was moist and fluffy, with a delicate but definite flavour, although not quite enough of the tang of rhubarb as I'd like. It seemed to go down well, although I think the whipped double cream and lemon curd topping was everyone's favourite part of the cake.

The Cake Club spread

So here's to the next Cake Club - it'll be held once a month, and the next theme is 'chocolate'. Perfect! 

If you want to join a Cake Club, check out the Clandestine Cake Club website and see whether there's a local club you could become a member of.

Lots of cakes

I made lots of cakes at the weekend. A chocolate sponge with chocolate buttercream featuring marshmallow fluff, a Victoria sponge with buttercream and raspberry jam, and chocolate brownies. Sadly, they were for various friends' celebrations (two graduations and a birthday); I managed a couple of squares of brownies (delicious) and a slice of choc sponge (brilliant).

I was really pleased with the sponges - nice and light, fluffy, and moist. Yum. The brownies, my new favourite thing to bake at the moment, were amazing - so gooey and brilliant in the middle, while good and crunchy on the top. I had some happy recipients of cakes that day.