Brownies by Paul

I've made brownies before, I've even made cheesecake brownies at some point, but they've never really been my favourite thing to make. It may be my fear of pouring hot things (melted chocolate) into egg mixtures, which can result in dramatic curdling. It may also be the fact that somewhere deep down, I think brownies should be a thing you can just get, without having to do the work yourself. Also, technically it's 'a brownie', until you cut them into squares and they become 'brownies', and somehow 'a brownie' reminds me of the girl scouts (actually; of Gilmore Girls, when Rory pretends to be a girl scout so she can talk to Dean's sister some more, and ends up running down the street completely embarrassed).

Whatever it is, a few weeks ago, I decided to make brownies the Paul Hollywood style. You may know Paul from The Great British Bake Off, where he is co-judge of Mary Berry. In fact, that is the only way I know Paul Hollywood exists, but he seems to be some kind of famous bread-person in the UK. Paul's book, How to Bake, had been sitting on my cookbook shelf for a while now, after an initial enthusiastic beginning of bread rolls. Luckily for Paul, he's also included some more bake-y recipes, otherwise it may have been a long time before I tried one of his recipes again.
Anyway, I made the brownies, and they were a disaster. Not taste-wise, but rise-wise. Paul tells you to use a 20 cm square baking tin, which I don't have, but I do have a 35 x 15 tin, which should be plenty. Unfortunately, it wasn't. The mixture poured over the top of the tin, gently coating the bottom of our oven, where it quickly turned into carcinogenic black lumps. Also, after 25-30 minutes, the brownies should be 'nicely crusted but still soft in the middle', whereas mine were 'brownie soup'. I stuck them back in the oven, after gently pushing in all the bits dangling over the side, for another 30 minutes. The mixture was still quite fluid, but now with a semi-hardened top. To let some air out, I pre-cut the brownies in the tin before sticking them back into the oven for another 30 minutes. Finally, they were done, nicely chewy in the middle with a firm crust. Despite the oven disasters, they tasted very very good.

Crappy picture, but I think you get the gist

But I can't have this recipe beat me, so today I decided to give it another go, only halving all the quantities. This made for quite a sad little puddle of brownie mixture in the bottom of my baking tin, but will hopefully prevent a repeat of the brownie waterfalls.

The recipe I used today is as follows:

50 g butter
100 g chocolate
2 eggs
125 g sugar
50 g flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
15 g cocoa powder
60 g walnuts (actually 50, but they sell it per 60 g here)

You can also add 50 g dried cranberries, but I'm not really a fan of fruit in my brownies, so I skipped those.

Preheat your oven to 180 C and line a 20 cm square (or whatever size you have) baking tin with baking parchment.
Melt the butter and chocolate together au-bain-Marie, stirring occasionally until the mixture is smooth and well-combined. Set aside to cool.
Using an electric mixer, mix the eggs and sugar together "until the mixture is pale and thick enough to hold a trail when the beaters are lifted". Let me help you out here: this is going to take a while. About 5 minutes, in my case. You should get past the famous 'ribbon' stage into a more thickly, almost custard-like mixture, with lots of air bubbles.
Now for the crazy part: fold the chocolate mixture into the egg-and-sugar mixture, stirring gently so you don't loose to much of the air you just worked so hard to get in.
Add the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder and fold in as well. Finally, add the chopped walnuts and whatever other filling you like.
Bake for 25-30 minutes or whatever time it takes for the mixture to become firm and not soup-like.

Looking much better!

In this case, it (they?) came out okay after 30 minutes, not as nicely crusted as the last time, but that may come with the cooling. We won't eat it until tomorrow, so I can't report on the taste yet, but as that was the only thing that actually went well the last time, I'm thinking it should be okay this time around too.