There is no end in sight to my baking odyssey. Today, my boss (he who wants me to write a blog post about the demise of The Bold and the Beautiful’s Stephanie Forrester), had a hankering for raspberry brownies, and I was happy to oblige.

Here’s the recipe, adapted from a treasured cookbook given to me by a lovely colleague:

• 250g dark chocolate, chopped
• 250g butter, chopped
• 1 1/2 cups of brown sugar (I used about a cup, really. I was tempted to use stevia, but wasn’t sure it would give the same fudgy result)
• 4 eggs
• 1/3 cup unsweetened chocolate powder (I used Cadbury’s powdered drinking cocoa, which contains sugar)
• 1 1/3 cups of plain flour
• 1 tspn baking powder
• 1/2 cup frozen or fresh raspberries

1. Preheat your oven to 170C.
2. Grease a 20cm square cake tin and line with baking paper. Leave enough paper hanging over the edges of the tin so it’ll be easy to lift the uncut brownie cake out after baking.
3. Melt the dark chocolate and butter together in a pan.
4. Crack the eggs into a large bowl and whisk together, then mix in the brown sugar.
5. Whisk the chocolate-butter mixture into the eggs-and-sugar bowl. You will be tempted to eat a large spoonful of batter at this point. (Maybe that’s just me.)
6. Sift in the dry ingredients. Mix well. You will again be tempted to eat an even larger spoonful of the batter. Go ahead. I would.
7. Stir in the raspberries, then pour the mixture into the baking tin.
8. Bake for 50 minutes. It’s deemed ready if you jab a skewer into it and find a few moist crumbs on the stick. (I tested it at the 40-minute mark and it there was a lot of moist goo as well as crumbs on the skewer, so I turned off the fan and baked for a further 10 mins.) Ironically, even though this recipe called for plain flour, it came out double the height of my famous low-cakes. Take the baking tin out of the oven, and let the brownie cake sit in the tin for at least 15 mins. The middle part of it deflated after a while — this is probably not normal. Lift the brownie cake onto a board/bench, then cut into squares.
9. Devour.

Back to writing now…