Dulche de Leche Brownies

Dulche de Leche brownies

One of life's little pleasures for me, is sitting down on a Sunday morning with a nice brew, a bacon sandwich and watching Something for the Weekend on BBC2.

Simon, Tim and Louise - My Sunday morning friends

One of my goals in life is to appear on the fridge with my version of one of Simon's recipes. I did send a photo in once or twice but alas it has never happened.

The week before the "big move" they made some delicious looking Dulche de Leche brownies on the show. I have just been calling them caramel brownies as I think trying to pronounce dulche de leche makes me sound like a tool.
I decided these were the perfect treat for my lovely helpful moving buddies.

So here is my attempt at the brownies, I have only ever attempted brownies once before and they turned out more like cake so I had very high hopes for these bad boys.

Ingredients

125g/4½oz condensed milk

150g/5½oz dark chocolate

115g/4oz unsalted butter, cubed

25g/1oz cocoa powder

3 free-range eggs

200g/7oz caster sugar

140g/5oz plain flour

Bubble bubble toil and trouble

I started off by boiling a can of condensed milk for around 3-4 hours, I know you can now buy the caramel in a tin and save yourself the trouble; but as I had never done it before I wanted to see what it was like.

WARNING The can made a rather worrying rattling noise, I spent most of the 4 hours stood outside the kitchen waiting for it to explode!

After 4 hours the can looked like this...

Mmmmmmmm.....

It took a lot of will power not to just dive in with a spoon!

Once the caramel was done and cooling nicely I started on the actual brownie mix, which was easy enough.

I started by melting the butter and chocolate together in a bowl over a simmering pan of water. Once it was totally melted I then whisked in the eggs, sugar and cocoa powder. I then folded in the flour, just enough so no white was visible.

I then spooned half the mixture into a square cake tin lined with greaseproof paper.
Then dolloped on bits of the caramel, the idea was to make a sort of marble effect, but the caramel was quite jelly like so just ended up in big lumps really.
Then I spooned the rest of the brownie mixture on top to cover the caramel.

Ready for the oven.

The instructions said to bake them for 30-40 minutes, mine were in for 34 and to be honest looked a little over-done! Quite dry and cracked on top and they didn't have that squishy brownie texture I was hoping for.

cracked and a little crumbly

caramel peeking out the sides.

When we first tasted them, they were still a little warm and I was a bit disappointed. They were dry and cake-like and the caramel was clumpy and air pockets had formed around the caramel lumps making them fall apart a little when cutting.

However, I can report after sitting for a day or so in a cake tin they seemed to settle and get a bit softer. I don't know why or how really, if you have any insight into the mind of these little suckers please leave a comment and enlighten me.

I don't think these are going to become a favourite in my house, but on the plus side I will definitely make caramel again! It was delicious!