Beetroot Brownies for Jamie’s Food Revolution Day Picnic

Tags

baking, beetroot, brownies, cake, chocolate, dessert, picnic

Hello there! It’s been a while… again. But I have a good excuse! We’ve moved house. Yup, we now live in an area outside the city on the coast – a 5 minute walk from the beach to be exact. For Athenians this is considered “a village”! Oh but it’s so lovely. See? The move was an experience. I’ve moved house several times in my life, 9 to be exact – not counting my years at University in England and not counting the time when I was little and we started moving to a flat up the street only to find the fridge didn’t fit through the kitchen doorway. My mum just took everything back to the old flat that same day! I must say, this time was very easy. We hired professionals to do all the work; packing, dismantling, transporting, the works. The hardest part for us was trying to stay out of their way. Check out their fantastically clever wardrobe box! After all 9,000 boxes were brought to the new house however, that’s when the tricky part for us started. Two weeks later and I’ve managed to get rid of all but four of them. Unfortunately, one of these contains my tupperware; it doesn’t fit in the kitchen, and I can’t live without it. So I have several trips to IKEA planned in a quest to find the right storage contraption. Any excuse to go get a hotdog!

A few days after the move, I got a message from a Greek food blogger friend (Wonderfoodland) inviting me to a picnic she and two other bloggers (Funky Cook and Sabor by Conna) were organizing for Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Day. FRD is an initiative to help raise awareness about eating healthy meals made from scratch. I had to choose from a list of fresh ingredients and make something to take with me. Luckily beetroot was on the list, so I got to try something I’ve been meaning to for a while now. Beetroot brownies! I used a recipe I found on Milk & Honey, which is very easy and requires a minimum of cooking utensils (crucial for me at the time). The only thing I did differently to the original recipe was leave it to bake for longer, as I wanted a more “cakey” brownie rather than a very fudgy one (easier to eat while sitting on a blanket in a park!). What a great day it was! It was so cool to meet fellow bloggers who are based here in Greece, I really hope to see more of them in the future. As with all foodies, they are a supportive and welcoming bunch, always ready with a good word!

Photos by Wonderfoodland

Ingredients

250g unsalted butter
250g dark chocolate
250g cooked beetroot (I use the vacuum packed type – make sure it’s not preserved in vinegar!)
3 eggs
250g white sugar
1/8 tsp salt
150g self-raising flour

Instructions

1. Preheat the oven to 180C (or 160C on fan mode). Grease a baking tin and line it with grease proof paper, making sure the paper overlaps the long sides (creating a handle to pull out the brownies when cooked). My tin is 18×24.5cm (7×9.5”).
2. Place the butter and chocolate in a bowl and melt in the microwave (in 30 second blasts, mixing after each blast). Alternatively, melt in a small saucepan over low heat, keeping a constant eye on it so it doesn’t burn. Let cool slightly.
3. Cut the beetroot into pieces and whiz in a food processor until smooth. Set aside.
4. In a large bowl beat the eggs and sugar till well combined and lighter in colour.
5. Add the chocolate mixture to the eggs slowly, while mixing constantly. Be careful if your chocolate is still very hot, you don’t want to cook the eggs!
6. Sift the flour and salt over the bowl and fold it in carefully.
7. When almost no flour is visible, fold in the beetroot until just incorporated. Don’t overmix. The batter will be quite runny.
8. Pour the batter into the tin and bake for 35-40 minutes if you want fudgy brownies, or about 50 minutes for cakey brownies. After 50 minutes my toothpick came out dry from some spots, slightly moist from others.
9. Let the brownies cool in the tin for 10 minutes or so, then lift out using the paper “handles” and place on a wire rack. Mine were gorgeously moist (not gooey), even with the extra baking time.

Instead of other beetroot recipes, I am listing a few of the blogs that participated in the picnic. There were several more but I didn’t get a chance to chat with them. Take a moment to visit these guys; they are doing a fantastic job!
Wonderfoodland (picnic organiser) – posts in both English and Greek (her savoury tart with feta, tomatoes, onion and olives is pictured above – recipe not online yet)
Sabor by Conna (picnic organiser) – posts in both English and Greek
Funky Cook (picnic organiser) – posts in Greek
Elena’s Cooking (picnic attendee) – posts in English (Pasta Salad with Zucchini pictured above)
Donkey & The Carrot (picnic attendee) – posts in both English and Greek (Cherry Pie pictured above)
Food Daily (picnic attendee) – posts in Greek

For more photos of yummy picnic food, or in case you really want to “Like” it, head over to the Food Revolution Day Athens page!

Salted Caramel Brownies and a Forgotten Birthday!

Tags

baking, brownies, chocolate, salted caramel

I feel terrible. I actually forgot my blog’s first birthday. That’s almost as bad as forgetting my child’s birthday! Ok, maybe not that bad, but still… Other bloggers do giveaways, others bake themselves cake… I not only forgot the day (which was the 5th), I also haven’t even blogged for a whole month. Inexcusable! As a belated Happy Birthday (at least it’s still February) I baked myself some brownies. Not just any old brownies mind you. No, these are extra decadent, extra sweet, extra fattening and extra delicious. They have a layer of melty, sticky, gooey caramel oozing out of the middle. Uh huh. Yup. Caramel. To be precise, salted caramel. Even better. Check out the golden stuff trying to escape from within the chocolate sandwich of fudgy-in-some-spots, crunchy-in-other-spots, brownie layers.

And how about those shapes? Clever or what? Another idea I wish I could call my own. In fact it’s Smitten Kitchen’s, the blog that made me want to try making these. Cut the brownies with biscuit (cookie) cutters! Not only do you get great shaped brownies, you also get a whole load of bits left around the edges that need cleaning up. Unfortunately/fortunately you just can’t serve these bits to anyone. I’m sure you know where I’m going with this… (yes, I ate ALL the straggly bits myself).

After getting the initial inspiration from that blog post, I thought I would skip making caramel from scratch and try using up a bag of caramel sweets I’d had stashed away for ages. I bought the sweets after seeing a recipe somewhere for something, then promptly forgot what and where that recipe was. So the sweets have been patiently waiting their turn to be transformed into a gorgeous dessert. I did some more research and found this recipe on She Makes and Bakes. Perfect. The only change I made was to use 3 tablespoons of evaporated milk in the caramel mixture, instead of cream. I couldn’t bring myself to open a carton of cream just for a couple of spoonfuls. For some reason I don’t have the same sensitivities about plain old evaporated milk. My next mission is to research whether I can freeze it – I’ll let you know!

Salted Caramel Brownies

Ingredients

1/2 cup (115g) butter
180g dark chocolate, chopped (or chocolate chips)
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1/2 Tbs vanilla essence
1/2 cup + 2 Tbs plain flour
1/4 tsp salt
200g milk caramel sweets (the square, quite hard ones)
3 Tbs evaporated milk (not sweetened condensed milk)
1/4 tsp + a pinch of sea salt

Instructions

1. Preheat oven to 180C. Line a baking tin with foil, leaving some foil overlapping two sides (you’ll use this to lift the brownies when cooled). My tin is 18×24.5cm (about 7×9.5″), you don’t want anything much bigger than that. Spray lightly with cooking spray.
2. Melt butter and chocolate in a bowl in the microwave, at 30 second intervals. Bring the bowl out and mix after each blast, otherwise you might end up with a huge mess in there. Have you ever seen butter explode in the microwave? Scary.
3. In a large bowl stir the sugar, eggs and vanilla with a wooden spoon. Be enthusiastic about it, until well incorporated. No, you don’t need the electric mixer for this.
4. After the chocolate mixture has cooled slightly add it to the other ingredients in the bowl, by pouring in a steady stream while stirring continuously.
5. When that is fully incorporated and the mixture looks glossy, stir in the flour and salt. Mix until you can’t see any flour.
6. Pour half the batter into the tin and bake for about 15-20 minutes, or until it starts pulling away from the sides and firms up on top. It will become a little lighter in colour as well.
7. Bring the tin out of the oven and cool for another 15 minutes or so.
8. While that is cooling, melt the caramel sweets, milk and 1/4 tsp salt in a microwave proof bowl. Again, do it in 30 second intervals because you’re always better safe than sorry. I think caramel might also have explosive properties. Mix well between blasts and keep going till it’s nice and smooth.
9. Pour the caramel over the cooled brownie layer, trying not to get right to the sides so it doesn’t run down the sides. However, it’s not the end of the world if it does.
10. Stick the remaining brownie batter in the microwave and blast for about 10 seconds, or enough so that the mixture becomes more spreadable again (it will have firmed up while waiting). Blob it around over the caramel layer in the tin, and try as best you can to spread it evenly. Get to the edges so you sort of seal the caramel in.
11. Sprinkle a pinch of sea salt on top of the batter and bake for about 30 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out fairly clean. With brownies you never get completely clean toothpicks, but they shouldn’t be very gooey and chocolatey either.
12. Let brownies cool in the pan. I tried to remove them after 10 minutes and the top got all cracked. When completely cool, cut with cookie cutters and clean up the remaining bits by eating them quickly before anyone sees you.

Sharing the brownie love…
Twix Caramel Brownies by Two Peas and Their Pod (these are gooooood)
Bacon Brownies by Nigella Lawson (tried and tested – you don’t even know the bacon is there)
Salted Caramel Frosted Kahlua Brownies by Tracey’s Culinary Adventures
Roasted Cherry Brownies by Tracey’s Culinary Adventures
I could go on and on…
Oh, and guess what… looking through my bookmarked recipes to create this list, I found the recipe for which I bought the caramels!
Chocolate Chip Salted Caramel Cookie Bars by Two Peas and Their Pod