Vegan Cherry & Pecan Fudgey Brownies!

Last week I did me a little baking at my boyfriend’s Mum and Dad’s house in honour of their 39th wedding anniversary! That’s right – 39 years!! How lush is that?! In order to celebrate Lawrence and I thought it would be nice if we cooked them up a three course extravaganza. I use the term ‘we’ very loosely as I am currently recovering from my second back operation so Lawrence did the majority of the cooking for the evening! My contribution were these tasty little treats which I have to say worked wonderfully!

The recipe below is adapted from Jamie Oliver’s Vegan Chocolate Brownies which can be found here. It is a fantastic recipe that includes no eggs and no butter but still manages to be full of amazing fudgey goodness.

Ingredients

– 5 tablespoons sunflower oil, plus a little extra for greasing

– 200 g dairy-free dark chocolate (I used Lindt 70% as it’s my favourite)

– 170 g self-raising flour

– 3 heaped teaspoons cocoa powder

– 180 g golden caster sugar

– Good pinch of salt

– 1sp of vanilla extract

– 230 ml soya milk (unsweetened or sweetened)

– 100 g pecan nuts roughly broken up

– 75g dried cherries

Method

Preheat your oven to 170ºC fan / 180º /350ºF / gas 4.

Grease a square baking tin (roughly 20cm) with a little oil, then line with greaseproof paper.

Break up your chocolate into little chunks and place 150g of it into a heatproof bowl. Place the remaining to one side.

Put the heatproof bowl, with the broken up chocolate, in your microwave and heat for 30 seconds. Give the chocolate a good stir. Continue to heat the bowl at 10 second intervals stirring in-between until all of the chocolate is fully melted. Be patient with this process and make sure you do it slowly in order to avoid burning the chocolate. (If you don’t have a microwave you can melt your chocolate the good old fashion way of placing the bowl over a pan of simmering water, making sure the base doesn’t touch the water.)

Once fully melted set aside to cool slightly.

Now sieve in the flour, cocoa powder and salt into a large bowl and then stir in the sugar.

Stir in the oil, soya milk, vanilla extract and melted chocolate and mix until combined. (Melted chocolate smells amazing!)

Now stir in your dried cherries, remaining broken up bits of chocolate and most of the pecans, reserving a few for the top.

Pour your chocolate goodness into your prepared tin and spread it out evenly. Sprinkle over the remaining pecans to finish it off.

Place your tin into your oven and bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until cooked on the outside, but still gooey in the middle. Don’t be afraid if it seems a little gooey, it will firm up as it cools.

Leave to cool in the tin for around 5 minutes and then turn out onto a wire cooling rack.

These bad boys can be served warm or cool and if you want to make them extra tasty add big scoop of ice-cream!