It’s marrow season. You know, when the courgettes go mad, and you’ve got to try to work out what to do with heaps and heaps of vegetables, brought from the allotment, that the kids won’t touch.
I’ve been making chocolate marrow cake for a while, but I decided to branch out, and went searching for a brownie recipe. I found an excellent recipe on Corner Cottage bakery for chocolate courgette brownies, and it provided the starting point for some experimentation. Because I’m all about Making it up 😉
I didn’t have any oil. Except olive oil, and I couldn’t see that working too well. And I’d run out of cocoa making two marrow cakes already. (It was a really big marrow.) But I did have a tin of Twinings Swiss chocolate drink, which is around 25% cocoa and chocolate. (I misread the ingredients at first and thought it was only 20%. My bad.) So I tweaked the ingredients around, and my recipe reads:
160g melted butter
250g Swiss chocolate drink. (This is the kind you have to add to hot milk, NOT instant hot chocolate.)
100g dark brown sugar
2tsp vanilla extract
250g self raising flour
250g marrow, peeled, coarsely grated, seeds removed
100g bashed up milk chocolate
I mix the melted butter with the chocolate drink and the sugar, very thoroughly, and then added the flour before doing more mixing. At this point it looks like dry bread crumbs. Bit scary. Don’t panic though, just add the marrow and chocolate.
Mix again, thoroughly. It should get a lot wetter at this point, and start looking like you expect brownie batter to look. Stickier than cake, thick, gloopy, all these adjectives spring to mind.
Spoon it into your pre lined 9 inch square tin. (Or in my case, 10 1/2 by 7 inch tin. Or if you use a smaller tin, be prepared for your brownie mixture to overflow all over your oven and burn horribly. Sigh.)
Bake. Mine takes around 50 minutes to an hour at 180 degrees in a non fan oven. Maybe I should be upping the temperature and baking it for a shorter time, but this means I get a really moist, fairly light brownie without the edges drying out too much. It’s really really good served still hot with icecream.
You’re welcome.
Linked up with
And why not making it up as you go? I never cooked cakes with marrow but i think it is time for me to try out! My girls don’t like it at all in normal meals so a cake could be a win!
Thank you so much for joining in with #FridayFoodie
No problem, it’s a surprisingly versatile ingredient.
This looks delicious and I love adding vegetables to cake-beetroot and chocolate works well too! Fab post! Thanks for linking up to #tastytuesdays
I’ve never dared try beetroot in cake, I must be braver
I made courgette and ricotta pasta yesterday which went down very well with M and Jasper, who both turned up their noses at the sound of it. http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/2195649/courgette-and-ricotta-pasta
My favourite courgette cake recipe is Nigella’s. It’s a bit faffy but very good: http://mixandfold.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/courgettecake.html
Ooh, will take a look at those, thanks Jan.
hmmm, looks so lovely 🙂
It looks lovely. Texture looks amazing. Thanks so much for linking up with #recipeoftheweek. Sorry I was particularly slow getting over for this one. I’ve pinned it to my food board and a tweet will go out shortly 🙂
No problem, lovely to have you pop by