Life is full of choices that define us, posts from which we hang moments off. Landing that job that we felt so passionately about, meeting the love of our lives, looking our children in their big, soul-gazing eyes for the first time, and making the decision to treat ourselves to Mini Egg Brownies.
If having Mini Egg Brownies appearing on your screens in February sends you into a state of confusion or fury, let’s look at this objectively.
‘What about Valentine’s Day?’ you may cry, or, for my kin, ‘But Pancake Day is first!’
While I can understand the dismay, they are simply one day each. One little, lone day on which it’s socially acceptable to wear leggings to work for the elasticated waistband (Hurrah for the self employed – my uniform is leggings everyday!) and gorge on a stack of pancakes more magnificent than Tom Selleck’s Mighty Erections in Three Men and a Little Lady (if you don’t get that reference, we’ll just breeze awkwardly past it and you should watch it the moment you’ve read this post. Then made the brownies. This post has provided a glorious snack recipe alongside the perfect movie suggestion… we’re full service here)
Anyway, I digress.
My point is – shops have swept Christmas out of the door by Boxing Day, and are already lining their shelves with Easter eggs. While I suspect that their motives are slightly more profit driven, I have decided to misinterpret it as a feel-good move, a good deed to society, allowing us to indulge through the rest of the chilly months as nature intended it.
On days when the gutter is gargling merrily on the fifth month of uninterrupted rain, outside is grey in every way and so is your mood, these chocolatey pastel-decorated squares of glory always hit the spot.
It is a simple enough recipe that kids can genuinely help without you having to stifle mutters of ‘oh shit’, and you get to hit stuff with a rolling pin, and if you don’t find that therapeutic, you aren’t doing it right.
Basically, I really like them.
I can see why this recipe was requested on instagram after I shared a photo: this is happy food at it’s finest. Gooey, decadent and gloriously healthy.
(Disclaimer – it’s good for your mental health. It’s not kale. No one likes kale, it’s so 2016… when we were all cooking it sprinkled with olive oil and pretending that it tasted like Pringles as opposed to shredded bin bag.)
This doesn’t taste like shredded bin bag. Ahh, I can see this post going viral with such promises. But my beautiful children are harsh critics, and not only do they not have a single complaint about these – but they will scurry off to tidy their bedrooms if I promise to make these. (I never thought I would bribe my children into simply contributing to family life, but hey, it’s true what they say: The perfect parents are the ones who don’t have kids yet.)
So, without further ado, here’s how you can rustle up this crowd pleaser:
Ingredients
200g (roughly 2 tubes) Mini Eggs
400g milk chocolate (I use Cadbury’s)
3 eggs
180g unsalted butter
45g cocoa
260g golden caster sugar
70g plain flour
Method
- Grease and roughly line a 20cm square baking tray
- Preheat the oven to 180’C (Gas mark 4)
- Place half of the Mini Eggs into a ziplock bag and smash them to bits. If you don’t have a bag fashion yourself one out of baking parchment
- Pop 200g of the chocolate with the unsalted butter into a bowl, and melt over water, stirring often. Once melted and combined, remove from the heat and set aside to cool.
- Beat the sugar into the eggs, then stir in the cooled chocolate/butter mixture
- Add the dry ingredients (flour & cocoa) and stir, followed by the other half of the chocolate broken into squares
- Pour into your lined tin and cook for 20 minutes
- Remove from the oven and scatter the smashed Mini Eggs over the top
- Return to the oven for a further 5 minutes, then remove, drop the rest of the Mini Eggs on top and leave to cool on a rack
*I have no willpower and most of it will be gone by the time it fully cools.
Et viola, Mini Egg Brownies.
I hope this brings you comfort on cold days, and joy on the warm ones. Let me know if you’re going to give them a try!
Helen x
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