No-Bake Chocolate brownies

Browsing through Nags’ Edible Garden, I felt like I stumbled upon a treasure when I discovered this awesome no-bake brownie recipe , and that too eggless. It took me a while to assemble all the ingredients and to get the lazy self into the kitchen, but when I found myself finally mixing them all, I knew I really had a treasure.

An awesome, very healthy, and ready in a jiffy recipe that makes a batch of at least 20 brownies, this one is for keeps. And I am going to make this every week from now on. :-D

Chocolate Fudge Brownie

Brownies are an all-time favourite in our house. So is it with my friends also. I have had a very reliable brownie recipe all along, but I felt the need to eliminate other flavours from this and make a plain chocolate brownie, for when the chocolate craving hits.
Here’s a little silly rhyme to go with the whole brownie experience …

Hop and skip in a loop,
Pair with a vanilla scoop.
Its that easy,
Warm this beauty.
Eat it as you lick your lips
And watch it grow on your hips! ;-)

Ingredients
100 gms butter
1 cup cocoa powder
1 3/4 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt
8 tbsps thick cream
1 1/3 cup AP flour
1/2 cup chopped Walnuts/White chocolate chips (optional)

Instructions
Melt the butter in a pan. Once this cools down, whisk the cocoa powder into butter.
Add the cream and mix thoroughly. And now blend in the sugar into this mixture.
Whisk flour into this mixture and mix well. Fold in the nuts in the end.

Pour this brownie batter in a greased 9x4 tin and bake in a pre-heated oven for at least 30 mins.
Once it cools, cut and store in airtight containers.

Peanut butter brownies… to welcome the holiday season…

 

I always get excited during October. Festive season. All the shopping. Happy moods all over.

After all, it is the closest to being our holiday season, something equivalent to the Christmas-New Year holidays. Everyone is in a celebratory mood right from Navratri to Diwali, so much so that , on some days there is no one in the entire wing in the office buildings. Its just contagious, this happy happy mood… and I love this mood.

So while the husband is planning to open up his 21-yr old Jack Daniels whiskey (gifted by a work colleague to him, comes in a super-sexy bottle which has all my attention – to serve as a home to one of my indoor plants :-)), I decided to bake something.

A lunch plan with a couple of friends at Prego is on the cards for tomorrow , (that is, if this whole Telangana bandh doesn’t spoil everyone’s plans!!! :-( ). Another reason to bake.

Some rummaging in my OneNote notebook in the Must-Trys section showed me some links for brownies. Something with peanut butter is what I wanted make for a while now. I clubbed both the words and Googled a bit, for some peanut butter brownie recipes. Instead of being swarmed with recipes, surprisingly I got just a couple. I mixed and matched them, and arrived at this recipe.

Ingredients

1/2 C peanut butter
1/3 C butter
1/2 C packed brown sugar
2/3 C sugar
4 tbsps thick cream (I used Amul cream)
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

1 C flour (all-purpose)
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp baking powder
1/3 C chocolate chips

Procedure

Beat the peanut butter and butter together with a fork for atleast 3 minutes till they both are blended well, and are smooth. Add the sugars to this and beat again, till the whole mixture is smooth.

Now add the cream and mix into the butter mixture. At the end, add the vanilla extract.

Now add the sifted flour, baking powder and salt mixture into this wet ingredient mix, and mix just enough.

Fold in the chocolate chips, and bake it in a preheated oven at 185 C for 25 minutes or when it passes the toothpick test. (Prescribed baking time is 35 minutes)

This batch yielded 20 pieces of brownies.

I took them out of the oven 10 mins before the prescribed baking time to let them be goo-ey and fudgy at the centre, and cut them after they cooled down. And man… what god-awesome they tasted! :-) With a rich peanut butter taste, and the crunch from the sugars, and the slight chocolate-y taste in them, I loved these brownies.

They had the almost-flaky finish on top, little dry in the next layer and gooey at the bottom, texture being just perfect.

After the Pound cake of this week and this brownie experiment, looks like I am on a self-claimed roll… This sure is a good baking week… :)

Cherry Brandy Brownies

 

While browsing for some good eggless brownie recipes, I bumped into this awesome brownie maker site, which has practically the recipe for every brownie in the world, using every possible ingredient. I loved it so much that I must’ve used it to bake atleast 5 different kinds of brownies, and all of them have been loved, asked for repeatedly and savoured by everyone who’s had one!

This one is just a template ,and you can substitute cherries for any fruit, and brandy for any drink you want. I baked this when we had friends over to watch one of the world cup matches, and they were finished before the match! Yeah, even the humongous amount of butter in this did not deter folks from digging in… :)

So here it is, a slightly modified eggless version of the original recipe.

Ingredients

150 gms butter
1-1/4 cups cocoa powder
2 cups sugar
1/2 tsp salt
2 tbsps brandy
10 tbsps thick cream (or 5 eggs if you don’t want it eggless)
1-2/3 cups AP flour
3/4 cup dried cherries
1/2 cup raspberry jam (I used cherry jam)
A pinch of cinnamon powder (optional)

Instructions

Pre-heat the oven to 185C and butter the aluminium foil pans.
Slightly melt the butter, so that it melts into a liquid, and whisk the cocoa powder in it once it cools a bit. Mix in the sugar and salt to this mixture.
After this mixture cools a bit, whisk in the brandy, cinnamon and the cream.
To this mixture, add the flour, and dried cherries and mix till it just blends.
Now mix the raspberry (or cherry) jam into this mixture, and mix just till it blends.
Pour this batter into the butter foil pan, and bake for ~35 mins. You’ll know that the brownie is done when the inserted toothpick comes out with some crumbs of brownie.
Once they cool, cut and serve the brownies either with ice-cream or just as-is.

And then tell me how they turned out! :)

Dark Choc brownie to end a tough day!

Today was not a good day. I cant point out at one reason, but it has been a very stressful day, with even a panic attack. Dont ask me the reason, I’ll tell you when I figure it out myself.
Suddenly at 3PM , I felt this craving to bake something. It might’ve been my mind’s escape mechanism to get out of the stress and calm myself, but it took a lot for me to stay on till 6PM at work after that thought. The minute I reached home, I ran to the kitchen and took stock of things I had. No walnuts. No Baking soda. But yes, loads of dark chocolate(I bought a big bar of cooking chocolate, inspired by N, hoping that would help me when I run out of stuff. And yes, it did!) Now what would I bake. One look at the recipe notebook(I bookmark all interesting recipes I come across in OneNote Notebooks, filed by sections. Yeah, I really use technology for all walks of life :P) and I saw that there were a couple of brownie and cookie recipes that I had wanted to try out.
My mind did a minor ping-pong jig and told me to do something with peanut butter and/or chocolate. More and more browsing led me to this fave site of mine. I picked up the recipe, halved the measures, modified it slightly to make it egg-less and voila! I had my dark chocolate brownie ready!
It tasted absolutely heavenly, and this is one brownie I am going to make and not share with anyone. Honestly!
Ingredients
8 tbsp (125gms or 1/4 of the 500gm bar) unsweetened chocolate, coarsely chopped
6 tbsps unsalted butter(75 gms – 3/4 of the Amul 100g butter pack)
2/3 cup all-purpose flour
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 cups sugar
2 large eggs (I used 4 tbsps yogurt, hoping it would add to the density)
1 teaspoons vanilla extract
1/2 teaspoon instant espresso powder
Oh btw, since the dessert was exotic, the dinner was just Foodles!
On a totally sidenote, do you think I might need help if I resort to baking even when I am stressed at work? Do you think this phase would pass off too? I hope it does, coz its not helping my hips! Sigh!