Chocolate raspberry brownies...

Courtesy of Shaheen at Allotment2Kitchen

This is recipe enticed me as firstly it looked yummy, secondly, we had guests coming round and thirdly, I have lots of raspberries. I didn't have a full bar of dark chocolate so used up some ends of different bars, 85%, 70% and dark chocolate with espresso that gave it an interesting extra twist.

Choc and frozen rasps

I did accidentally use the wrong sugar (granulated instead of caster) and also used frozen raspberries that I didn't have the patience to defrost properly. This meant that the top took longer to cook and so the bottom was a bit over cooked.

Before cooking

Seemed to go down well with our guests anyway and we had second helpings with ice cream (which was handy as I needed freezer space for homemade tomato sauce base).

After cooking! You can see the granules of sugar...this wouldn't have happened if I'd used caster

So maybe if I do it again I'll either defrost the rasps properly or mix them in throughout? I'm not very good at experimenting with sweets, better to follow the excellent recipe! Savoury food I'm a bit better at going off-piste. Anyway thank you Shaheen for a great recipe. We went out for a trip into the countryside today and the last couple of bits went down a treat.

Linking to August's bookmarked recipes at Tinned Tomatoes

Posted with Blogsy

Kalhua and courgette brownie bars

I was having a look at Shaheen's excellent food blog http://allotment2kitchen.blogspot.co.uk the other day and spotted this recipe from 2010 that she's highlighted on her homepage -  http://allotment2kitchen.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/kahlua-courgette-brownie-bars.html, I just happened to have all the ingredients including an old bottle of Kalhua that had been knocking around for years so decided to give it a go last night....yum!

I haven't got a tray bake tray so did it in a glass oblong dish instead which worked out fine. One slice wasn't enough as a taster and we munched our way through a couple each. Still lots left for the weekend though, phew.

I forgot to give it a Kalhua wash before baking but still turned out quite shiny. Also I don't normally have much caffeine (except for in choc) so probably best not to give it too much Kalhua for me. I did experiment with a bit of a mixture of sugar as we had some odds and ends of packets left, so the sugar was mainly soft light brown, with a bit of muscavado and white granulated and I made sure it was all mixed in as evenly as possible.

So I was quite pleased as don't do much baking usually :)