Chocolate Walnut Brownies

Bloody 'ell; just how difficult is it to cream 250g of butter and 300g of caster sugar together until light and fluffy? Without a Kitchen Aid I hasten to add or any other food mixer. Just a wooden spoon. Mine certainly didn't get really light and fluffy; my arm hurt then the twitch in the eye returned so I gave up bashing away at it. It hadn't started well either. My local Chocolatiers had run out of their basic couverture so I had to purchase several bars of chocolate instead - decent stuff mind but at over £10 you would bloody well hope so. Then I ran out of plain flour and had to top up with 10g or so of self-raising. Well it was either that or brown bread flour and I was sure that wasn't going to work!

Chocolate Walnut Brownies

• 300g golden Caster Sugar
• 250g Butter
• 250g Chocolate 70% coca solids
• 3 Eggs plus 1 extra yolk
• 60g Plain Flour
• 60g Cocoa Powder
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 100g chopped walnuts

Oven at 180C and baking tin lined with baking parchment. Sugar and Butter beaten until light and fluffy (well it got me through Hollyoaks...) Chocolate - less 50g - broken into pieces and melted over a pan of simmering water. The retained chocolate needs to be chopped into small pieces. The eggs are added slowly to the sugar/butter mix followed by the melted and chopped chocolate and the chopped walnuts. Finally the sieved flour, baking powder, pinch of salt and cocoa powder needs to be folded into the mix.

At this stage I forgot to add a big splash of rum. But no matter. I also considered retaining one of the egg whites and whipping this until the soft peak stage before folding in. The idea was to add a little lightness but by the time I remembered I had beaten them all together!

Spoon into the tin. I scattered a few walnuts over the top then popped it into the oven for just over 30 minutes. Everyone has their favourite brownie recipe; this is mine.