It was my little sister’s eighteenth birthday yesterday and instead of getting her a rubbish present that she probably wouldn’t have enjoyed I decided to make her brownies, which, rather unfortunately, enticed a number of her friends to our house before they went out. I wish I had never bothered. On the plus side these have been described as the world’s best brownies by, seemingly, everyone who has ever eaten them. I must, however, admit that I have alighted this recipe from somewhere else and feel obliged to attribute it to a certain Mrs. Dimbleby, an ex-Sunday Telegraph food writer of fifteen years.

This is also the first dish on which I get to use my brand spanking new camera, I hope the photos look as good as I think they do. The batch used in this recipe is a double batch so will make a massive heap of brownies, which is no bad thing. However, if you don’t need 32 brownies you could make half. Also I would recommend using the darkest chocolate you can, it will give more depth of flavour, anything above 70% will do. In all these delicious, gooey chocolate brownies will take an hour to prepare and bake.

Ingredients:

• 200g butter
• 80g cocoa powder, as dark as you can get it
• 100g dark chocolate, 70% or above
• 4 medium eggs
• 1 tsp salt, level
• 450g light muscovado sugar
• 100g self raising flour
• 100g pecan nuts, roughly chopped (optional)

Method:

Melt the butter gently in a pan on the stove, to this whisk in the cocoa powder. Once added combine this with the chocolate in small chunks until it has all melted together. Pre-heat the oven to 180C.

In a mixing bowl, while the chocolate is melting, whisk together the eggs, sugar and salt, using a hand mixer. This will take a number of minutes and should be frothy similar to the photo below.

To the egg mixture whisk in the chocolate in the saucepan until it is uniform. Sieve in the flour and gently fold it in. Pour this into a baking tin lined with greased baking parchment. Bake for 25 minutes and not a moment longer, they need to have a hard shell on the outside and be very gooey on the inside.

Leave the brownies to cool briefly, turn them out and cut into 32 individual pieces. They probably won’t need to be any larger than this.

Cost: This particular batch cost £2.70 to make, if you exclude the fact my eggs were free. However it is a double batch, so a normal sized, frugal batch of half the above ingredients will obviously cost half to make – rather more thrifty. Considering a single brownie from a supermarket can cost as much as 80p I’d say this was a pretty fantastic bargain.