These brownies have served me well over the years; gooey and ridiculously rich, they’re irresistibly moreish! Frankly, I don’t understand why people don’t make brownies more often; they are so easy to throw together and always go down a treat, especially with kids.

Utterly delicious but devastating on the hips, this recipes makes quite a few brownies and invariably I end up giving most of them away to friends and random neighbours. I do this not out of generosity, but out of fear of my expanding waistline! Normally I can exercise admirable control when resisting sweet temptations, but with these, I turn into a brownie munchin’ fiend!

There is nothing pretentious about this recipe; this is easy-baking, that makes for great eating.

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Chocolate Brownies:

• 375g butter, soft
• 375g dark chocolate (see. Note Below)
• 6 large eggs
• 1 tbsp. vanilla essence or extract
• 500g caster sugar
• 225g plain flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 200g chopped nuts (walnuts, pecans or brazil nuts)
• A Baking Pan, either 30cm x 30cm or 40cm x 25cm

Note: Many brownie recipes recommend the best quality chocolate you can find, to my mind this is a complete waste of money and good chocolate. I prefer to use a combination of regular (i.e. Cadburys) and high-end (i.e. Lindt) dark chocolate; typically I would use 100g of expensive chocolate and the other 275g is made-up with regular dark chocolate. At the end of the day, I cannot personally bring myself to spend the equivalent of the average South African’s daily wage on just chocolate! I love my food but these are, after all, just brownies and trust me, nobody is going to taste the difference.

Method:

1. Preheat your oven to 180 degrees Celsius
2. Grease your baking pan. Line both the sides and bottom of the pan with baking paper
3. Melt the butter and chocolate together in a saucepan on the hob. Once it has melted, mix until smooth. Take off the heat and allow to cool slightly.
4. In a bowl, beat the eggs and vanilla with the sugar
5. In a second bowl, add the flour and salt
6. If you have a cake mixer, add the chocolate sauce and beat for a couple of minutes to allow the sauce to cool down a bit more. Beat in the eggs and sugar, followed by the chopped nuts and then the flour. You don’t have to use a cake mixer, you can just as well do this by hand
7. Beat until lovely and smooth, scrape the mixture out into your lined baking pan
8. Place in the centre of your preheated oven
9. Check your brownies after 30 minutes, the top should be dried and flaky but still moist in the middle. Give your pan a gent shake, if the centre of the brownie wobbles, then they will need to go back into the oven for another 5 to 10 minutes.

You don’t want the brownies to cook all the way through and as they will become dry – so you mustn’t overcook them. The size of your baking pan will affect the cooking time, the smaller the pan the longer you will have to bake the brownies. Personally, I would rather have them slightly underdone and gooey, than dry. Don’t worry if they seem a little “wet” when you take them out of the oven, the brownies will continue to cook as they cool. I like to leave mine for a couple of hours (or overnight) with a tea towel covering the baking pan to cool completely, before cutting them up into pieces.