Chocolate honeycomb 'brownies'

I don't make brownies very often, but when my latest issue (March 2011) of BBC Good Food arrived in the post I flicked through it as usual and these caught my eye. They are part of a fairly new series in the magazine called 'Junior Cook' - recipes made by children submitted to the magazine and these are called 'Alex's mega brownies'. I can't find the recipe online yet, but when it appears I'll try and remember to link to it, but the original recipe has got a milk chocolate and cream cheese topping too, which I didn't fancy making.

I've called them 'brownies' in inverted commas because they aren't as fudgy and gooey as most people like their brownies, but instead are a rich, fairly dense shallow cake type bake. But none the worse for that! It's just that I don't want people to get the wrong idea about how these turned out for me. I was actually quite sceptical about the recipe before I started because the instructions clearly say a 20cm square brownie tin and then the picture is a rather obviously rectangular cake. It does sometimes make me wonder whether all of the recipes are triple tested to the word, as they claim.

I had a packet of Belgian milk chocolate coated honeycomb that I wanted to use up - yum, chocolate coated honeycomb! I thought that it would add an interesting texture to the brownies so I added this and then a few white chocolate chips too, as I had an open packet of those. Do you like the spotty decoration? J gave me some stencils for Christmas so I thought I'd try them out to break up the monotonous brown-ness!

So here is the recipe with my (minor) modifications:

Chocolate honeycomb brownies
Ingredients
100g softened butter
175g caster sugar
2 large eggs, beaten
75g plain flour
50g cocoa powder
1 tsp baking powder
3 tbsp milk
100g chocolate coated honeycomb
about 30g white chocolate chips (I wouldn't bother with these next time)

Method
- Preheat the oven to 180C/gas 4 and line a 20cm square brownie tin with baking parchment.
- Beat the butter and sugar together then add the eggs one by one.
- Sift in the flour, cocoa powder and baking powder then add the milk.
- Mix everything together then stir in the chocolate honeycomb.
- Spoon into the tin and level the top.
- Bake for 30 minutes (mine took 40) until the top is set, then cool completely.

Enjoy!

I will definitely be making these again. Although they're not the fudgy gooey sort of brownies a lot of people look for in a brownie recipe, they appealed to me greatly. They were slightly chewy and chocolatey and I really think that the addition of the chocolate coated honeycomb was inspired. I didn't really know how (or if!) it would work, but I really, really loved it. The pieces stayed together (I don't know if this was because they were coated in chocolate before they went in, because I've been wondering about making my own honeycomb and using that, but am concerned that without a protective chocolate coating it will all just dissolve into the brownie mixture during baking) and there was a delicious caramelly, honeycomb flavour that worked really well with the brownies. The textural contrast was fab too - it was delicious biting into a bit of chewy honeycomb after the softness of the brownie, and I love the way the honeycomb gets stuck in your teeth! I wouldn't bother adding the white chocolate chips again though, they didn't really add anything flavour or texture wise.