Hummingbird Chocolate Brownies
I spent an afternoon baking with my cousin Sophie (Hi Soph!) and we made some chocolate brownies from The Hummingbird Bakery Cookbook. I’ve made these brownies before, but this was probably the best they have ever turned out – for once, it wasn’t too gooey in the centre and we could actually slice it up instead of eating it straight out of the baking tray.
Again, it’s a really simple recipe to follow and you just need to make sure you time it right when taking the brownies out of the oven. It’s best if they are flaky on top and soft, but not completely gooey in the centre when you stick in a knife/skewer to test it.
We ran out of dark chocolate, so had to use an Aero bar to make up the 200g – not sure if this made a big difference in the end. I find that 325g of caster sugar is a little too sweet for my taste, so we put in a bit less but it didn’t affect the mixture.
Lastly, to finish, we decided to dust with icing sugar over some stencils.. a star (the glow in the dark variety) and a ‘S’ (for Sam and Soph) .. it all worked quite well, we might have been a little heavy handed at first with the icing sugar but it tasted all the same and apart from the backwards ‘S’ (see above..), it all looked good!
Brownie mix before and after… Greaseproof paper is the best thing to use for the mix, it saves you a lot of cleaning on the tray and it’s easier to lift the brownies out of the tray too. The only slight problem is that the edges of the brownies end up a little deformed and not a square shape!
With the stencils, we had to be careful lifting up the stencils after the icing sugar had gone on and making sure there was enough icing sugar to see the shape.
Lastly.. Soph and I with our brownies!