The Things We Do For Love

It's our wedding anniversary tomorrow so in honour of the occasion and because I'm always being moaned at for making cakes for other people and none for Rob I have made Chocolate Brownies.  This has meant the ultimate sacrifice has had to be made - I've had to use the only bar of dark chocolate in the larder (stocked purely for medicinal purposes of course).  I shall have to hope for a bountiful chocolate harvest at the weekend to make up for it.

The brownies are made from a Lakeland recipe no longer extant on their website meaning that I had to go searching through the pile of printed out recipes in the kitchen, peeling the pages apart from where they'd been spattered with ingredients from long-ago-consumed offerings (there is a chocolate brownie recipe on there but it's not this one).

If you want to make some too the ingredients you'll need are:-

225g soft margarine
110g dark chocolate
400g caster sugar
2tsp vanilla extract
4 beaten eggs
100g walnut pieces
170g plain flour
pinch of salt
1/2tsp baking powder

Melt the margarine and chocolate together.  It's best to do this in a large Pyrex bowl in the microwave.  Once the chocolate has melted add the sugar and mix well then add the vanilla extract, eggs and walnut pieces.  Measure out the flour, salt and baking powder and fold them into the chocolate mixture.  If you can resist the urge to eat the raw mixture, pour it into a lightly greased brownie tin and bake at 160C for 50 minutes.  Be careful not to overcook the brownies, the top should have just a slight crust while the underneath remains soft.  If you can bear not to scoff them straight from the oven, leave the brownies to cool in the baking tin.  The recipe says the mixture makes 36 brownies but here in the real world mine are divided into 12 because there's just no point in making them any smaller for Rob.

The first time I cooked this recipe I'd run out of table salt and used sea salt from the grinder instead.  The salt sank to the bottom of the cake mix making an interesting contrast between salty base and gooey chocolatey cake.