Double chocolate chip brownies, just because she wanted to

Now that school is in full-swing, and my hours at work have moved forward so that I start earlier, we are finding weekday mornings kinda tough.  We all still wake at the same time as before, but now there's no leeway or spare time whatsoever, and we've had to learn to love the clock, not.  If you aren't at the kitchen table and done with breakfast by 7.25am you miss out.  Seriously.  I've had to get creative with what can nourish the kids on the hop...

And the afternoons aren't much better - between homework, chill time, swimming lessons, Brownies, Girl Guides, dancing class and gymnastics, there's little leeway there either.  And we want to add ski lessons in to the mix, crazy!
So when one of the kids expressed a desire to bake brownies, well, we had to look at the schedule!  I felt bad about that, that we couldn't be a bit spontaneous, but I suppose that teaching them about commitments and responsibility will always be valuable.  So when today dawned wet, and resolutely stayed that way all day - we knew it was time to indulge.

As with any good teaching opportunity, we got out the recipe and all our ingredients.  Then started to prepare everything, so we would be ready to just toss them into the mixture at the appropriate time. White chocolate was chopped, eggs were cracked and mixed with vanilla extract, flour was sifted and so on.

As she is young and less experienced than myself, a lot of the white chocolate chunks melted when added to the brownie batter, so we quickly chopped some milk chocolate and sprinkled it over the top.  Time was of the essence, so the next photo is of the tray in the oven (hence the darkness - also it's quite rich and chocolatey).

It was quite wobbly when the timer went off, so I left it another couple of minutes before I removed it to cool.  We had started making it just before afternoon tea-time, so The Team were itching to try it! I cut it up straight away, and we all sampled it warm.  We were impressed, but also confused because it seemed more cake-like than our fudgy brownie usually is.  

But after we'd had our warm fill, it got more brownie-like as it cooled, and by the time the photos were taken, it was perfect!  Yummy, and the perfect rainy day activity treat.