The Hairy Biker’s chocolate brownies

One of the nice things of being back in the Netherlands is that I can watch all the food programs the BBC offers. The last two weeks I have followed Dave Meyers and Simon King, on their search for ‘Best of British’. In Friday’s episode the Hairy Bikers explored the relationship between American and Britain’s culinary cultures.

I am so glad I didn’t resist the urge to make the chocolate brownie from this episode. It’s a fantastic, gooey brownie with dark and white chocolate chunks and crunchy nuts.

The original recipe can be found on the BBC food website. I made my brownie in a 20X20 cm square cake tin, so it took a bit longer to bake. I replaced the pecan nuts by hazelnuts and left out the cherries.

Ingredients

200g butter

175g caster sugar

175g soft light brown sugar

4 large eggs

100g plain flour

50g cocoa powder

125g plain dark chocolate chunks

125g white chocolate chunks

100g hazelnuts

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 190C/375F/Gas 5. Lightly butter a 20x20cm square cake tin and line the base and sides with a large sheet of baking parchment.

Put the butter in a medium saucepan and place over a very low heat until only just melted. Remove the butter from the heat and stir in the sugars until well combined. Whisk the eggs in a large bowl until smooth and slowly pour the butter and sugar mixture on top, stirring constantly until well combined.

Put the flour and cocoa powder in a sieve and sift on top of the egg and butter mixture. Beat hard with a wooden spoon until smooth. Leave to cool for 10 minutes. (This will prevent the chocolate chunks melting too quickly when they are added to the batter.)

Roughly chopped the hazelnuts and stir them with the chocolate pieces into the cake batter. Pour into the prepared tin and spread to all the corners with a rubber spatula or the back of a spoon.

Bake the brownie in the centre of the oven for 40 minutes, or until the mixture is crusty on the surface and lightly cooked inside.

Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 5-10 minutes. Take out of the tin and transfer to a board. Cut into squares or rectangles to serve warm or leave to cool completely if serving cold. 

Chocolate-Cherries Cake

Special order this weekend for the new elected chairman of the dutch rowing association. 
Flavor of the day: a 4 layer cake, half chocolate, half vanilla, with mascarpone-whipped cream filling and cherries. Decorated with chocolate shavings. 
One big tasty cake ! 

Black&White Layer Cake

Whenever my baking urge is strong at the beginning of the weekend, and cupcakes are not an option since I always want them to be as fresh as possible when taking them to work, I go for a big layer cake! 

This one has 5 layers and is made of devil' food cake and a white cake. In between some home-made strawberry jam. Strawberry Swiss Meringue Butter Cream to finish it !Very yummy !

Chocolate Cupcakes

This recipe must be the one I use most. Chocolate cupcakes always encounter a great success. It’s a simple recipe and gives perfect results.

This time I tweeked it up by adding crushed oreo’s in the batter and the frosting. No quantities to give you there, just add as you feel like.

Cakes

135 g flour
2 tsp baking powder
25 g cocoa powder
175 g brown sugar 

1 packet of vanilla sugar
50 g butter, softened
125 g of cream

2 eggs

Preheat oven to 170 ° C.
Sift the flour, baking powder and cocoa powder and add a pinch of salt, the brown sugar, the vanilla sugar and the softened butter. Blend on low speed to obtain a sandy texture. 

Mix the cream with the first of the eggs and then add the other one. Pour half of this into the mixture and mix until smooth before adding the other half.

Fill the baking cups to 2/3 and bake for 20-25 minutes. Cool 5 minutes in pan before removing from pan and continue cooling on the rack.

Frosting

100 g butter
300 g of icing sugar
40 g of cocoa powder
40 ml of milk

Mix the softened butter with the icing sugar and cocoa powder. Add the milk and beat until light and fluffy. The longer the better! 

Not so red but very velvety cake

I always find it difficult to get the real red that makes a red velvet cake or cupcake. The new bought red liquid red might be easy to use but it definitely does not get me the red I wanted. But … as long as the cake is velvet, right? And velvety it is!

Read with me for another successful Hummingbird Bakery recipe. The recipe is for 12 to 16 cupcakes and is perfect for 2 20cm round baking pans.

For the cake you will need:

120 g butter, softened

300 g sugar

2 large eggs

20 g cocoa powder

40 ml red food colouring

1 tsp vanilla essence

300 g plain flour

1tsp salt

240 ml buttermilk

1 tbsp white vinegar

1 tsp bicarbonate of soda

Grease and line your pans while you preheat your oven at 190°.

Cream the butter and the sugar together until pale and fluffy (best cake related word ever). Break in the eggs one at a time, beating thoroughly after each addition and mixing in the scrapings from the side of the bowl.

In a separate bowl, stir together the cocoa powder, food colouring and vanilla essence to form a paste. Add the paste to the batter, mixing thoroughly until the paste is completely incorporated.

Sift together the four and salt in another bowl (yes you will need all the bowls so better have a dish washer or no fear of washing up), then add the flour to the batter in two batches alternating with the buttermilk. Lastly, in another bowl (told ya!), mix together the vinegar and bicarbonate of soda (and look closely what happens here: baking is chemistry!) by hand and add it to the cake batter mixing it in until it is fully incorporated.

Spoon the batter into the prepared baking pans. To make sure that each pan has the same amount of batter, I use (as I do to fill cupcake cases) an ice cream spoon: around 10 each will do.

Place in the oven and bake for 20-25 minutes.  Allow to cool for a while before removing the cakes from the pan to continue cooling on a rack.

For the frosting you will need

100 g butter softened

600 g icing sugar

250 g cream cheese (such as Philadelphia)

Beat the butter and the icing sugar together until no large lumps of sugar remain and the mixture is sandy in texture.

Add the cream cheese and mix together slowly until everything is incorporated, then increase the speed to medium and beat the frosting until it is soft and fluffy (yep! Again).

I choose to cut both cakes into two layers and spread a thin layer of frosting between every layer. If you prefer thick layers of frosting you can choose to leave the cakes as they are and just stick them together with lots of cream cheese frosting.

Preview of two upcoming recipes

Cookies

Cookies from the classics Oatmeal-Raisin and Chocolat Chip 

And some cakepops try out (not very succesful)