Bake Off: Biscuits and Traybakes (#GBBO)

Still a week behind with my Bake Off inspired bakes, I decided to bake some traybake brownies to accompany my watching of this week’s episode (it’s impossible to watch Bake Off without some sort of baked goods in the house). I’ve made quite a lot of biscuits this year already so I thought I’d go down the traybake route – especially as my first attempt at these chocolate fudge brownies was not particularly successful. Time to learn from my original mistakes!

I made just a small batch of these fudgy brownies:

Melt 200g dark chocolate together with 175g butter in a heatproof bowl over a pan of simmering water. As always, don’t allow the water to touch the bottom of the bowl.

Stir in 325g caster sugar, followed by 130g plain flour, followed by 3 eggs, incorporating each ingredient fully. After this stage you could also add some chopped nuts for an extra something.

So far, so simple! That’s your finished brownie mixture! Now just spoon it into your tin (about 35x20cm) lined with baking parchment and bake on 170°C for 35-40 minutes. The outside should be crispy and the inside should still be fudgy. I don’t like it too fudgy though (too sickly) so on this occasion gave it a little extra time.

So here’s where I went really wrong last time – with fudgy brownies where the centre is really soft, you need to allow them to cool completely before attempting to remove them from the tin. If not all you’ll end up with is delicious mush. I even sat the base of the tin in a shallow bath of cool water to speed up the cooling process!

Once cool, turn out and slice into pieces. A dusting of icing sugar makes them look extra pretty!