Macadamia and White Chocolate Brownies

Easter is a busy time for the conscientious cook; even if there are no visitors, the family will probably be eating more at home because of extra time off work. It didn't take long for the previous chocolate cake and the Easter Marzipan biscuits to disappear. I'm still cooking mainly low saturated fat recipes, as CT still hasn't found out his current cholesterol levels, so spent a while going through my books, and searching online, looking for something suitable. My small repertoire seems to have already encompassed versions of most of the recipes available. I eventually found this recipe for brownies in 'The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Chocolate', which differs from other recipes I've used, as it uses vegetable oil, chocolate and cocoa. The original recipe added plain chocolate and walnuts, but I decided to enhance the visual appeal, and the luxury, by using macadamia nuts and white chocolate, as well as some plain chocolate. It's no coincidence that Julian Graves had a half price sale on all it's products last week!

Ingredients
150g plain chocolate, melted
120ml sunflower oil
215g light muscovado sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 eggs
65g SR flour
60g cocoa
75g macadamia nuts, chopped
50g white chocolate, chopped
50g 60% plain chocolate, chopped

Method
Preheat oven to 180C and line an 8" (20cm) square tin with parchment.
In a large bowl, beat together the oil, sugar, eggs and vanilla extract. Stir in the melted chocolate and then beat until the mixture is smooth and amalgamated.
Sift the flour and cocoa into the bowl and fold in. The mixture became quite thick at this stage.
Fold in the nuts and chopped chocolate. Transfer the batter to the baking tin and spread evenly.
Bake for about 30 minutes until a probe comes out with a few damp crumbs sticking to it. Cool in the tin before cutting into squares.

This was a dense and moist brownie with a good flavour, and a crisp flaky top. The only criticism is that the brownies became a little crumbly when they were completely cold. This recipe comes second so far, of those I've tried, behind those made with mayonnaise.