Brownies

Whilst I usually like to challenge myself in my baking sometimes it's nice to just kick back and knock something pretty simple up. Today, I decided to make brownies, and whilst I don't think I've ever actually made them before, they are ridiculously simple to make. I've definitely had enough practice at tasting the little devils so it's time I branched out and sampled some home-made ones.

I explored my many baking books for recipes however most of them tried to be a bit too 'fancy pantsy' and added nuts and all sorts to the mix whereas I wanted to do pretty plain and simple ones (plus it was too cold to go out to the shops so I had to stick with what I had in the cupboards!) So I found a few recipes on the internet and eventually went with one from a cadbury's website. However, most brownie recipes will use only dark chocolate in the mix but I decided to substitute some of the dark chocolate for milk chocolate  (about 110g of dark, 65g of milk.)  I did this for two reasons: I don't particularly like dark chocolate and sometimes find some shop bought brownies too bitter and because, as mentioned before, I was too warm and comfy inside to venture to the shops and I only had 110 grams of dark chocolate left.

As far as making the brownies goes - a child could could make them. Once you have melted the chocolate and butter its just beating things, mixing things and pouring things. Easy!

Before putting the brownies in the oven, I sprinkled some white chocolate that I had cut up as small as possible on top - partly as an experiment and partly to get rid of it as I didn't really have enough left  to do anything of substance with.

When removing the from the oven, I was a bit worried that I had over baked them but once I had left them to cool, turned them out and cut them up I realised that the insides were still nice and soft and fudgey.

Even though I'm on the common January diet that hits most people who have over eaten at Christmas, I had to give them a try, I'm not sure anyone in the world would have the will power to not give fresh brownies a go. I was worried they might be a bit too sweet with the addition of the milk chocolate but they are not at all, even the boyfriend who doesn't really have a sweet tooth ( more about that here: http://onegirloneoven.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/way-to-boys-heart.html) approved of them.

This recipe may be simple but it just proves that sometimes the simplest things are the best.

Pain in the Pretzel

Its been a while since I last baked - life seemed to get in the way a lot towards the end of last year but for Christmas I received a few recipe books as gifts and they renewed my desire to create great bakes once more. I spent a good while looking through them all and marking the recipes that took my fancy and one of those was Pretzels.

I decided to tackle these for a couple of reasons; I'd never made them before and as I've stated before on this blog I like to attempt lots of different types of bakes rather than just stick to one type, I also assumed they would probably be a bit of a challenge.

You probably could say (and I'm sure an experienced baker would...) that doing pretzels is a walk in the park and for the first part it is. The dough is a regular white bread dough, just enriched with a little melted butter and a couple of teaspoons of sugar. It's after the dough is needed that, for me, things got tricky.

In order to shape the pretzels you first need to roll out the dough into long sausages, it's during this process that I discovered that not only was I rubbish at writing with my left hand, I'm pretty darn spazzy at rolling out dough too. This meant that one side was continually thicker than the other - I tried to counteract this by flipping the dough around regularly. After a good while I finally found myself with a few sausages of dough. (incidentally its a REALLY good arm workout, mine were actually aching at the end, I'm going to convince myself its because its hard work not because I'm weak and unfit!)

Then came the most important thing: the shaping:

My recipe book did little to help explain how to do it correctly so I turned to old faithful,  Youtube, which quickly shined some light on the situation.

In the end I managed to create a few things that looked at least a little bit like pretzels; consistency is not my strong point, but it was a first attempt.  I decided to mix it up and made a couple of plaits and one big pretzel to go with the little ones. I think the one thing I could do to improve would to be to have thinner sausages so that the pretzels don't loose their shape as much when rising and cooking.

The overall verdict is that they don't taste too bad, I think the dough could do with being a little sweeter, but that can be tweaked easily enough. They taste nice even if they don't look quite so good. (This seems to be a theme of mine!)

All-in-all they are not so much a walk in the park, but a bit more of a sweaty jog in the park.