Light anf fluffy brownie featuring dried vanilla pods

Chocolate Brownie's close up shot

An all-time favorite recipe of mine for a quick and delightful afternoon snack is the brownie. It is quick and easy to make but the taste of the fresh baked brownie, which oozes fresh molten chocolate from the middle when your cut with your knife through it is so complex, sumptuous and flavorful so that you quickly will forget all your new year’s resolutions concerning weight loss. But there are so many recipes out there and so little time to bake them all. So let me introduce you today to my recipe that I found best after making it a few times. I do not use any baking soda as I don’t like any artificial baking ingredients or flavors. Like this, also the brownie will not be too heavy and the taste is just right. I am using dried up my left over vanilla pods for the portion of vanilla in the recipe, you can replace it using vanilla aroma If you like but I advise to use fresh vanilla, the taste is just so much better this way.

Crushing dried vanilla pod with some sugar

Ingredients:

• 110 g butter
• 100 g chocoloate (70% cacao)
• 80 g confectionary sugar
• 1 Tbsp. honey
• 2 eggs
• 2 dried vanlilla pods grounded to powder OR 1 1⁄2 table spoon of vanilla sugar
• 1 tea spoon of salt
• 40 g wholewheat flour
• 60 g cacao powder
• 2 table spoon sour cream
• 50 g crushed walnut pieces
• 50 g milk cholocate pieces
• 1 table spoon of rum

Preheat the oven to 175°C. Now mix and melt the dark chocolate, the butter and the vanilla powder in a bain marie. When everything is molten and mixed well, take it off and let it cool down a bit.

Molten chocolate butter mix

In the meantime, mix the eggs with the sugar, honey, vanilla and the salt using a mixer and beat everything for 2 – 3 minutes on the highest speed possible. The mix should be a bit of white color and fluffy with a lot of air bubbles inside. Now add this egg mix and the rum to the chocolate mix

Adding the egg mix to the molten chocoalte

Now, sieve through the flour and the cocoa into this bowl and add the sour cream.

Sieving the flour and the cocoa into the batter

Now mix everything well so there are no clumps in the mixture left.
Last but not least add the walnuts and the chocolate pieces to the batter.

Chocolate pieces and crashed walnuts

Carefully with a spatula mix the flour with the rest of the batter. Now you can butter out a baking pan and pour the batter in and pop it in the oven for about 40 minutes. If you are not sure if the brownie is baked through, you can stick a wooden tooth pick in the middle of your baked brownie. Pull it out and check. If there is still a lot of liquid batter sticking to the toothpick, it’s not ready yet. If there is nothing liquid sticking to the toothpick, you are ready to go.

Please also make sure that the baking pan is not too large for the amount of batter that you got. The batter should come up 2 cm, so when it is baked, it will be about 5 cm in the baking pan. I made my brownies using individual baking forms, but when you use a big baking pan, just cut the brownie cake in squares and serve them up nice and hot while the molten chocolate still oozes out…

Brownies on a plate with a scoop of straciatella ice cream