Nina's Passionfruit Brownies

A short posting on these birthday brownies I made for my pal Nina, who - like me - has a penchant for passionfruit. These brownies are dark, fudgey and guaranteed to lift the spirits on cold February days. Though thankfully we've entered March so I won't complain about how awful February was (I mean seriously, it was cold!)

The recipe was adapted from Nigel Slater's "very good brownies" in his Nigel Slater's Diary book, I simply halved the recipe and threw in a few passionfruit. You could of course add walnuts or other fruit such as raspberries, pears...

Makes 12 brownies

Ingredients:

• 125g dark chocolate (70% if possible)
• 125g butter
• 150g light brown sugar
• 40g cocoa powder
• 40g self-raising flour
• 2 medium eggs + 1 extra yolk
• pinch salt
• seeds and pulp of two passionfruit

Method:

The beauty of brownies is in the ease of preparation. There's no method per se, just chuck everything together and bake for 1/2 hour til they're done.

Preheat oven to 180C. Place some greaseproof paper in a 18cm square baking tin. 

Over a saucepan of simmering water, place a heatproof bowl and in this bowl put the butter and chocolate. Allow to melt, then take off the heat and add the sugar, stirring til incorporated, and add the eggs. Sift the flour, salt and cocoa powder into this mixture and stir again,  finally adding the passionfruit pulp. 

Bake on middle shelf of the oven for 1/2 hour - the brownies are done when you insert a skewer and there's some dense crumbs left on the skewer but no gloopy, wet mixture.

Allow to cool 1 hour before cutting into pieces, or eat the brownies whilst warm :-)

* if you want to make brownies and freeze them for future use, double the quantity here and freeze what you don't eat immediately - great for when you need an emergency dessert at a dinner party or just when you need something uplifting on a rainy afternoon