Beetroot and chocolate brownies
A lot of you will have seen that first ingredient and put your yuck face on. Yeah, that one. But I want you to try and forget about the beet, because it's a stealth ingredient. A ninja ingredient, that is invisible to the taste buds, but makes these brownies infinitely more awesome.
If you still think nobody will eat them, you could just not tell them (allergies allowing, of course). Or, if they turn up their noses, you can feel justified in scoffing the whole, delicious, rich cake yourself.
Yum.
Beetroot and chocolate brownies
by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
You can either grate or purée the cooked beetroot before adding to the mix - the latter gives a slightly more velvety texture. They work just as well with or without walnuts. Some people think that a brownie isn't a brownie without walnuts, while others can't stand them; it really depends on your personal preference.
Makes 15 squares.
Ingredients
* 250g unsalted butter, cut into cubes, plus a little more for greasing (I used salted)
* 250g plain chocolate (about 70% cocoa solids), broken into squares (We didn't have 250g, and we also didn't have dark chocolate. So we used about 130g milk chocolate, and made up the rest of the weight with 120g pure cocoa powder.)
* 250g caster sugar
* 3 eggs
* 150g self-raising flour (Hugh uses wholemeal self-raising, I used White Wings Gluten Free Self Raising Flour Mix)
* 100g broken walnuts (optional) (I tend to use pecans)
* 250g cooked and peeled beetroot, grated or puréed
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 170C/325F/ gas mark 3. Lightly grease a baking tin that's roughly 20cm x 30cm in size and at least 2cm deep. Line the bottom with greaseproof paper and butter the paper, too.
2. Put the cubed butter and chocolate into a heatproof bowl. Place this on an oven tray lined with a baking sheet, and put in oven to warm up. After a few minutes, remove, stir, then return to the oven to melt completely. (Alternatively, melt the chocolate and butter in the conventional manner, in a bowl held over a pan of barely simmering water.)
3. In another bowl, whisk the sugar with the eggs until smooth and creamy. Stir in the chocolate mixture until well combined. Sift in the flour, stir, fold in the walnuts (if using) and beetroot. Pour into the prepared tin.
4. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until a knife or skewer comes out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it - be careful not to overcook the brownies. Remove from the oven, then stand the tray on a wire rack until cool enough to cut into squares.
My Notes
* This cake cooked wonderfully the first time I made it. The second time, my mixture was runnier and it took longer. Still, was damn good.
* For the beetroot: I assembled and weighed a number of beetroot - they came to about 270g. I washed and peeled them, and reweighed them, and they were exactly 250g. So allow about 20g for the peel if you aren't bothered weighing them twice. I diced them to about 1cm cubes, then boiled them in water for about 20 mins - 1/2 hour. Check on them now and again to make sure they don't boil dry. Beets don't go crumbly like potato, but they should noticeably soften a little. Poke the pieces with a fork. Don't panic if they don't soften much. That's what your blender/food processor is for. When you think they're done, put the beet and a little of the water (not much) into your machine of choice and blend or pulse until it's evenly pulverised.
* As stated in the ingredients above, I subbed out some of the chocolate for cocoa purely because I didn't have enough, and it worked perfectly. I put the cocoa in with the chocolate and melted it all together with the butter rather than adding it with the dry ingredients, though that probably would have worked too. We used the conventional chocolate melting method - butter melted a little in the microwave because it was straight out of the fridge, chocolate and cocoa stirred in and melted/blended together over low heat. We tend to use a pyrex bowl on a saucepan filled with water, but sometimes we just use the hotplate turned way down because our hotplates heat up glacially slowly so the risk of burning the chocolate is pretty low.
* I put 100g nuts in the first batch, and it really wasn't nutty enough. Next time,. I'll use twice as many.
* Though the recipe says this makes 15 squares, I got 24 perfect brownie squares out of mine, and I wasn't stingy on size.
* I tried to make this dairy free by using coconut oil, and though the flavour was good, it was really super crumbly, to the point of being a bit ridiculous. I'd probably put some xanthan gum in if I was going to make it GF/DF again.
* If you REALLY don't want to use beetroot, or if you have someone who is allergic to it, I imagine almond meal would work just as well to keep this cake rich and moist, but you would have to add some liquid to keep the mixture the same consistency.
This entry was originally posted at http://iamshadow.dreamwidth.org/343883.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
If you still think nobody will eat them, you could just not tell them (allergies allowing, of course). Or, if they turn up their noses, you can feel justified in scoffing the whole, delicious, rich cake yourself.
Yum.
Beetroot and chocolate brownies
by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall
You can either grate or purée the cooked beetroot before adding to the mix - the latter gives a slightly more velvety texture. They work just as well with or without walnuts. Some people think that a brownie isn't a brownie without walnuts, while others can't stand them; it really depends on your personal preference.
Makes 15 squares.
Ingredients
* 250g unsalted butter, cut into cubes, plus a little more for greasing (I used salted)
* 250g plain chocolate (about 70% cocoa solids), broken into squares (We didn't have 250g, and we also didn't have dark chocolate. So we used about 130g milk chocolate, and made up the rest of the weight with 120g pure cocoa powder.)
* 250g caster sugar
* 3 eggs
* 150g self-raising flour (Hugh uses wholemeal self-raising, I used White Wings Gluten Free Self Raising Flour Mix)
* 100g broken walnuts (optional) (I tend to use pecans)
* 250g cooked and peeled beetroot, grated or puréed
Method
1. Preheat the oven to 170C/325F/ gas mark 3. Lightly grease a baking tin that's roughly 20cm x 30cm in size and at least 2cm deep. Line the bottom with greaseproof paper and butter the paper, too.
2. Put the cubed butter and chocolate into a heatproof bowl. Place this on an oven tray lined with a baking sheet, and put in oven to warm up. After a few minutes, remove, stir, then return to the oven to melt completely. (Alternatively, melt the chocolate and butter in the conventional manner, in a bowl held over a pan of barely simmering water.)
3. In another bowl, whisk the sugar with the eggs until smooth and creamy. Stir in the chocolate mixture until well combined. Sift in the flour, stir, fold in the walnuts (if using) and beetroot. Pour into the prepared tin.
4. Bake for 20-25 minutes, until a knife or skewer comes out with a few moist crumbs clinging to it - be careful not to overcook the brownies. Remove from the oven, then stand the tray on a wire rack until cool enough to cut into squares.
My Notes
* This cake cooked wonderfully the first time I made it. The second time, my mixture was runnier and it took longer. Still, was damn good.
* For the beetroot: I assembled and weighed a number of beetroot - they came to about 270g. I washed and peeled them, and reweighed them, and they were exactly 250g. So allow about 20g for the peel if you aren't bothered weighing them twice. I diced them to about 1cm cubes, then boiled them in water for about 20 mins - 1/2 hour. Check on them now and again to make sure they don't boil dry. Beets don't go crumbly like potato, but they should noticeably soften a little. Poke the pieces with a fork. Don't panic if they don't soften much. That's what your blender/food processor is for. When you think they're done, put the beet and a little of the water (not much) into your machine of choice and blend or pulse until it's evenly pulverised.
* As stated in the ingredients above, I subbed out some of the chocolate for cocoa purely because I didn't have enough, and it worked perfectly. I put the cocoa in with the chocolate and melted it all together with the butter rather than adding it with the dry ingredients, though that probably would have worked too. We used the conventional chocolate melting method - butter melted a little in the microwave because it was straight out of the fridge, chocolate and cocoa stirred in and melted/blended together over low heat. We tend to use a pyrex bowl on a saucepan filled with water, but sometimes we just use the hotplate turned way down because our hotplates heat up glacially slowly so the risk of burning the chocolate is pretty low.
* I put 100g nuts in the first batch, and it really wasn't nutty enough. Next time,. I'll use twice as many.
* Though the recipe says this makes 15 squares, I got 24 perfect brownie squares out of mine, and I wasn't stingy on size.
* I tried to make this dairy free by using coconut oil, and though the flavour was good, it was really super crumbly, to the point of being a bit ridiculous. I'd probably put some xanthan gum in if I was going to make it GF/DF again.
* If you REALLY don't want to use beetroot, or if you have someone who is allergic to it, I imagine almond meal would work just as well to keep this cake rich and moist, but you would have to add some liquid to keep the mixture the same consistency.
This entry was originally posted at http://iamshadow.dreamwidth.org/343883.html. Please comment there using OpenID.