Brownie for Fish

Last week my friend’s husband went fishing and Jenny brought me in some lovely fresh snapper (I pan fried it and we had it with a pea and mint pesto). As a thank you, I made Adam some brownie, which is his favourite.

I have my favourite brownie recipes (a recipe that I have made up myself that makes a large tray of brownie, a Donna Hay triple chocolate brownie recipe from her Flavours book, a white chocolate and macadamia brownie from the Cibo cook book and latterly the quintuple brownie recipe from Dorie Greenspan), but as I often do, I decided to try a new recipe. This time I used one from Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries. He said that the brownie was a thick, sludgy brownie, which is just the kind of brownie that I like.

Except, I didn’t really like this brownie. It was almost too chocolatey, which is hard for me to say! I used Whittakers 70% chocolate and dutched cocoa – maybe I should have just used Cadbury cocoa? In any event, it wasn’t as good as I had hoped for. One thing that was very different in the recipe to others that I use (and of course as soon as the brownie wasn’t as good as I had hoped, I totally obsessed, finding every brownie recipe I had ever used and looking to see what the differences were!!), is that the butter and sugar were creamed together. With all my other recipes, and especially the top 4, you melt the chocolate and butter together, beat the eggs and sugar together and then mix everything together. I won’t be making Nigel’s version again – even though Adam thought it was great and is happy to trade fish for brownie again (as am I!).