Chocolate and Butterscotch Brownies

Chocolate and Butterscotch Brownies are my favorites. I think chocolate and butterscotch go together like coffee and cakes.

This is one of my favourite recipes because it is really quick and easy to prepare too.

You should be able to understand the ingredients whether you are English, like me, or American because I've used both languages in the recipe.

Ingredients

• 1 cup (4oz) sieved (strained) self raising (cake) flour
• 4oz butter
• 1/4 cup (2oz) castor (fine grained) sugar
• 3 tbs treacle (or molasses)
• 1/2 tsp vanilla extract
• 2 large eggs
• 4oz chocolate chips
• 2oz chopped nuts

Topping

• 3oz butter
• 1 cup (4oz) icing (confectioners) sugar
• 1 tbs treacle (or molasses)
• 1 tbs cocoa powder
• chocolate chips for decoration

Method

1. Preheat the oven to 375 deg F (190 deg C). Grease a 7 inch square cake pan.

2. Put the butter, sugar and treacle or molasses into a pan and heat until the sugar dissolves. Leave to cool.

3. Put the mixture into a bowl, stir in the vanilla extract then beat in the eggs for about one minute if you are doing it by hand.

4. Fold in the flour, then the chocolate chips and nuts.

5. Pour the mixture into the cake pan, level it off and then bake for about 30 minutes.

6. When ready, leave it to cool in the pan for about 5 minutes, then turn out and allow to cool completely. Take care because it might break up.

7. To make the topping, put the butter, cocoa powder and icing (confectioners) sugar into a bowl and cream together until light and fluffy. Beat in the treacle or molasses.

8. When the cake is completely cold, spread the topping over it. Cut in half longways, then into about 12 slices and decorate each slice with one or two chocolate chips.

This is an excellent tutorial on how to make chocolate brownies. The instructions are given in a clear voice and at a speed that matches the actions in the video so you can absorb both the commentary and the demonstration. It's one of the best recipe lessons I've seen.

There is such an amazing number of variations on the basic brownie recipe, it's worth buying a really good cookbook or two on the subject. That way you can try out many different combinations of ingredients in brownies and you might find some that become firm favourites among family and friends.

Here's another very good video demonstrating how to make triple chocolate brownies. You'll see they are very easy to make.

I don’t like to heat my oven up just to cook one thing. It seems a waste of money to me, bearing in mind the cost of gas and electric nowadays.

Of course, I could do a big batch of brownies or other baked goods too but I don’t always want spend time doing a lot of baking when all I want are a few brownies.

The answer is an electric brownie maker like the one illustrated here. They only take a few minutes to warm up to the correct temperature and they aren’t heating up extra, unused space. These brownie makers are neat and clean in appearance and aren’t going to hog a lot of space in your kitchen either.

There are so many different variations of brownies so we all have our favourites. It would be great if you could introduce us to yours by putting the recipe here.