Thursday 6 May 2010

Ginger Chocolate Squares

This is an adaptation of Martha Stewart's recipe for White Chocolate-Gingerbread Blondies. I'm not going to call them blondies, because even baking the mixture in a tin only 2/3 of the stipulated size, the result was no thicker than a cookie. I halved the ingredients in the recipe, then baked in an 8" square tin, for 35 minutes. Instead of 5 oz (150g) of white chocolate I used 100g of dark chocolate chips and 5 nuggets of stem ginger, chopped into pieces. I also doubled the ground ginger in the recipe.

Here's my ingredient list, 'translated' to metric weights:

190g plain flour
1/2 + 1/8 tsp bicarbonate of soda
pinch salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1tsp ground ginger
1/8 tsp ground cloves
150g butter
155g light brown sugar
70g caster sugar
1 medium egg + 1 egg yolk
1 tsp vanilla extract
55g black treacle
100g plain chocolate chips
5 nuggets stem ginger, chopped to a similar size to the chocolate chips.

The result was a dense, gooey, cookie-like chewy bar, with crisper outside edges where the mixture had risen during cooking, then collapsed back when cooling. Despite the use of treacle, which has a bitter edge to its flavour, the bars were very sweet; if I bake these again I will use a better quality plain chocolate bar which is lower in sugar than the chocolate chips. From the point of view of our personal tastes, I was right to increase the ground ginger.

6 comments:

Lucie said...

These look lovely Suelle, nice to see something different - you are great at adapting things.

Choclette said...

With all the changes you've made, they are a brand new recipe and a very nice sounding one too.

Suelle said...

Thanks Choclette - I'm always reluctant to post something without referring back to the recipe which gave me inspiration, as I don't devise recipes from scratch.

Katie said...

These look delicious and wonderfully fudgy. Love the added ginger elements

Celia @ Fig Jam and Lime Cordial said...

Chocolate and ginger is one of those magic combinations! Those squares look delish, Suelle! :)

Alicia Foodycat said...

These look really good! And I agree with Choclette - it may have been inspired by another recipe, but this is all yours!