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Recipes

Brownies

This page is the result of a brownie-tasting event I held in 2002, ostensibly to celebrate the Queen's Golden Jubilee! (The truth is that the four-day weekend gave me enough time to do all the baking...)

I was interested in how one kind of recipe could require the same ingredients in such wildly differing proportions every time I found another version. So I made eight different brownie recipes and asked my poor friends to come along to a tasting trial.

The recipes are shown here in order of popularity on the night, and are copied verbatim from the sources (that is, including all the waffle that cookery writers like to add), with a few of my own notes [in brackets]. I made them all to the plainest version – without nuts, chocolate chips or icing – for consistency.

• Recipe 1 – Mary Berry
• Recipe 2 – Nigella Lawson – my personal favourite!
• Recipe 3 – Helge Rubenstein
• Recipe 4 – Biscuits and Slices Step by Step
• Recipe 5 – Sarah Reynolds
• Recipe 6 – Zoe Kavanagh
• Recipe 7 – Heart and Soul
• Recipe 8 – Delia Smith
   
• Chart of all eight recipes