Omg, such a good post here! B R O W N I E ! But not just your standard share a plate, bad quality chocolate, over baked dry brownie you get at shared lunches at school. This is an elegant brownie, that is super moist with fresh walnut pieces, dusted with icing sugar.
I don't know if they do this in Canada but in primary school and intermediate we would have things called sharing lunch. And like if your class had been good for a term or someone was leaving the class we would having a shared lunch. It usually was on a Friday and everyone in the class would bring s plate full of food to share with everyone else. Most people brought pizza from the shop, chips, cooked red sausages. My mum would always send me to school with some home baked goods because of the money factor it is cheaper to make the food yourself. With all the kids we had their was a share lunch every week for someone.
She would send me to school with a vegetable plate, picklets (whch are mini hotcakes) that you eat with butter and jam. Muffins and slices. My plate was always the first to go so I would always take the plate to school and just before we placed the plate on the table to share with our class mates at school I would reserve some of Mums baked treats in my school bag.
I am a sucker for brownie, no I am a sucker for chocolate. Anything chocolate I crave. I love it. But it has to be good quality. So there would always be a brownie at the shared lunches. It either was store brought or poorly made.
My brownies are completely different, using top quality chocolate. We also had a walnut tree on our farm. During the season the little husk things (what the walnuts were encased in) would drop off the tree. I would go round and pick walnuts for 4 days straight. There was so many! I think we had a really old tree because I would pick about 100kg a season.
The best way to store walnuts is in potato sacks and hang them in a dry environment to dry out for a year! Yes a year. So you cannot skip a year of picking because you won't have any stock to replenish you for next year. I love walnuts.
I remember at primary school we had two big walnut trees outside our classrooms. At playtime myself and my friends would go stand by the walnut tree and pick walnuts. We then would place the shells on the concrete and break the shells with our feet and break open the shell and eat the walnut inside. Sometimes this is all I would eat for morning tea. 1kg of walnuts haha.
I tend to place my brownie batter in a square tin, so you get nice squares that you can cut diagonal to get nice triangles. Plus I like to have nice thick brownies. I hate brownies that are thin and dry. You want a nice thick piece of brownie to bite into.
I usually would smash all the walnuts over a weekend and break them up and remove the nuts from the shell. Place them in mason jars so that whenever I came to cooking and needed walnuts I wasn't having to go out the back of the house and hammer down some of the shells of the walnuts.
Store the walnuts in jars in a dry place of your pantry and your walnuts will last a very long time. There is something about fresh walnuts from the farm that taste so delicious. I always brought store brought walnuts and could never eat them on their own as I could with other nuts. I think it is where they are a drying them or that 1 year process. Because that is very important, if you keep it in a damp musty area, your walnuts are going to taste like that.
I have a photo tutorial for you. Well I found it on my hard drive and thought I better add it in.
Melt your butter over low heat.
Here I am using the best chocolate we have, Dark Cacao this is 72% but you can use less if you would like. I just like my brownies super rich.
Sift all the dry ingredients into another bowl.
Here I am on the front deck harvesting the walnuts.
I use a hammer to smash open the shells, you can buy special nut crackers which will crack it nicely with two halves. I highly recommend this if you are going to be opening a lot of nuts.
Add your sugar to your dry ingredients!
Place the chocolate into the butter mixture and melt over medium heat until the two ingredients are well combined.
Sift the dry ingredients and pour them into the chocolate butter mixture. Mix until well combined.
Crack your eggs into the mixture and mix one egg throughly until it is well combinded into the mixture. Repeat until you don't have any more eggs to use.
Mix your roasted walnuts into the mixture. Pour the brownie into a square tin lined with baking paper.
Bake for 30-40 minutes, depending how gooey you want your brownie. If you like a super gooey brownie cook it for 25minutes, almost half the time if you like a firmer brownie watch to after 30 minutes so you don't over bake it.
Rich Chocolate Walnut Brownie
Recipe:
245g dark chocolate (70% cocoa or more)
200g butter
175g caster sugar
125g brown sugar
4 large eggs
2 teaspoon vanilla
115g plain flour
pinch salt
100g dark chocolate (60% or more) chopped up
Optional:2 cups chopped walnuts
Method:
Preheat your oven to 180 degrees. Grease a rectangle tin, depending on what thickness you want the brownies, I like really thick brownies so you get that gooey centre.
Put chocolate and butter in a saucepan and melt over low heat.
Once all the chocolate mixture has melted, remove from heat and allow to cool.
Whisk the two sugars into the chocolate mixture with a balloon whisk once the mixture is at a lukewarm temperature.
Add your eggs and vanilla extract, whisking your eggs thoroughly between each addition.
Sift your flour and salt into a seperate bowl. Slowly add the flour mixture to the chocolate mixture.
Optional to add walnuts in the mixture, add them now if you would like them. I like to have them in the brownie mixture because it breaks up all the richness to have bitter nuts in the brownie. Stir until well combined.
Pour your batter into a lined tin and smooth the surface of the brownies.
Bake for 30-40 minutes. Depending how gooey you like your brownies, I pull my pan out when the edges are cooked, and thats it. The rest of the brownie slowly cooks when it is out of the oven but is left gooey.
If you are adding chocolate chunks, take the brownie out 20 minutes before it is finished cooking, throw the chunks all over the top. Return to the oven for more cooking.
Slice the brownie when it is cool, into triangles and dust with icing sugar!
Yum yum x
