Gooey Chocolate Brownies

My cat Piaf likes fillet steak.  It is entirely my fault this situation has arisen.

It happened after I gave her a few trimmings of some fillet steak I was preparing.  Now every time I give her minced beef, she looks up at me with a "what the hell is this?" expression on her face, and no longer eats it with the same gusto she used to.  It is the same with chocolate.  Once you've had the good stuff, it's really hard to go back to milk chocolate. 

When cooking with chocolate, it is important to use a good quality dark chocolate.  And by that, I mean chocolate which has a high percentage of cocoa (cocoa butter and cocoa solids).  There is a lot of choice available now, and my supermarket sells chocolate with percentages up to 85 percent.  The percentage you choose to bake with depends on whether you want a bittersweet, semi-sweet or really sweet result.  Chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa is like a blank canvas.  It has less sugar so provides a rich, deep chocolate flavour, and allows you to play around with the amount of sugar required. Chocolate with a lower percentage has more additives like sugar, vanilla and lecithin (an emulsifier), so you are already dealing with a sweet ingredient, and may need to alter the sugar quantities in the recipe to get the balance right.  Basically, if you want a really sweet result, use dark chocolate with a lower cocoa content.

One chocolate recipe that needs a lot of sweetness is the good, old fashioned brownie. If you like a brownie with a high goo factor, this recipe is for you.  It uses dark chocolate with 50% cocoa, to which a lot of brown sugar is added.   The end result is rich, sweet, fudgy brownie, which I can highly recommend.

Gooey Chocolate Brownies

150g unsalted butter, chopped
440g dark chocolate, with 50% cocoa
1 1/2 cups light brown sugar
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 cup plain flour
1/2 cup sour cream
3/4 cup walnuts

Preheat the oven to 180 degrees celcius.  Grease and line a brownie tin.  I always use a 24 x 24 cm deep square tin. 

Chop 300g of the chocolate roughly, put in a bowl and melt over a saucepan of gently simmering water.  Add the butter and take the saucepan off the heat.  Stir the butter with the chocolate until smooth. 

Chop the remaining chocolate into small pieces. 

Add the brown sugar, eggs, vanilla extract, flour, and, sour cream to the melted chocolate and stir until smooth.  Add the chocolate pieces and the walnuts and stir until evenly distributed. 

Pour the mixture into the tin, and spread evenly.

Bake for 40 minutes initally, cover with foil and then bake for another 20 minutes.  Leave to cool in the pan.  Turn out and cut into evenly sized portions.

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