• 185g Unsalted Butter
  • 185g 80% Dark Cholocate
  • 85g Plain Flour
  • 40g Bournville Cocoa Power
  • 50g Green and Black's white chocolate
  • 50g Green and Black's milk chocolate
  • 3 large eggs
  • 275g golden caster sugar
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Not Borscht (aka Chocolate Brownies)

Some time ago, our friend Vincent suggested we make Borscht on our Suggest-a-Recipe page:

Borscht: Tastes great. Is a fun word. I loved it as a kid (still do or is it still am). And changes the colour of your pee. Vincent.

We looked into this (briefly). We homed in on a recipe for ukrainian classic borsch and decided that the ingredients were so revolting that we’d make something that had absolutely no beets or cabbage in it: Chocolate Brownies! Sorry Vincent. We hear on the grapevine you’re not very keen on chocolate brownies. We’ve saved you some though, just incase. You could eat this instead of borscht and hopefully you can then rejoice over your normal coloured pee like the rest of us non-borscht eating people. It could be a like changing moment for you.

How we did it:

  • First of all we looked for a really good recipe. We ended up going for this chocolate brownie recipe on the BBC Good Food website. It’s completely free of beetroot and cabbbage – a good sign when cooking brownies.
  • Jess did her first official chocolate test – the quality was “ok” (but she had to check 2 or 3 times). We cut the butter and the pre-tested dark chocolate into small pieces and put them in a bowl and microwaved for 2 and a half minutes and left to cool.
  • We put the oven on and left to heat to 160C. Easy that.
  • We cut out a square of greaseproof paper and lined the base of a 20cm square tin. This took us about 4 hours but you can probably do it in a minute assuming only adults are involved.
  • We combined the flour and cocoa powder and sieved it into a bowl (pushing the last few bits through with the back of a spoon – an advanced technique that involves military training. If you haven’t tried it before ask your mum).
  • We chopped up the white and milk chocolate into small pieces (see photo). Jess ate a fair amount of this – her second commission. At this stage we were probably 5% down on chocolate ingredients.
  • We broke the eggs into a bowl and combined with the sugar. We mixed it until it had the consistency of a thick milk shake (about 8 minutes).
  • We poured the cooled chocolate mix over the egg mix and very gently folded it together.
    Then we poured the mixture into the prepared tin.
  • We put it in the oven for 25 minutes and when ready took it out let it go cold.

What we thought of it:

We went to Jas and Jo’s house and served it up. Everyone liked it. Aunty Lindsay included – you can see her (hands only) in the photos. I think you can tell she loves it right? Even from the hands. You can only imagine how glowing her face was.