Quick Chocolate Brownies

There is not much that offers more comfort than cooking up one of your favourite recipes. You can visualise the finish product before you even begin. You know the recipe is going to work. And most importantly, you know it will taste GOOD.

And that is why I made my chocolate brownies today. This recipes does not call for any chocolate and, instead, uses cocoa powder for the chocolate flavour. So if you can't be bothered melting chocolate this is a handy recipe for you. Obviously the quality of the cocoa will affect how the final product will taste. So if you can get something like Valrhona that will be perfect. As a variation I added roughly chopped walnuts into the recipe. This will add some crunchy nuttiness and bitterness to the slice so amount of sugar may need to be adjusted accordingly. As usual I did not frost my brownie but a chocolate frosting can definitely be spread on the top while the brownies are still warm to add sweetness and moist.

1/2 cup melted unsalted butter
2/3 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla extract
1/2 cup cocoa powder
1/2 cup plain flour
1/4 tsp salt
1/4 tsp baking powder
Walnuts, roughly chopped or broken into halves

1) Preheat the oven to 175 degrees C. Line a square baking pan.
2) Mix together butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla. Beat in cocoa powder, flour, slat and baking powder. Stir in walnuts. Spoon mixture into the prepared pan.
3) Baking for approx 25 minutes.

My brownies today are slightly overcooked today and they taste a bit dry to me. And you can tell by the bubbles appearing on the top of the slices. I'm blaming this to the pan that is larger than I thought, making the brownies a bit thinner and therefore faster to cook through. But that did not stop me from enjoying 2 slices after they came straight from the oven - again chocolate goodness has saved the day :P

And I saw this on smitten kitchen today. and OMG how good do they look!!!! I can't wait to try to make some!!