Earlier this week my work was giving away some free cookbooks to the staff, (I know, SCORE!), and I picked up this fabulous little book: The Ultimate Brownie Book, by Bruce Weinstein. It's got dozens of brownie recipes in it - blondies, applesauce brownies, cheesecake brownies, frostings, brownie waffles, brownie pancakes, low fat brownies (but seriously, what is the point?), black and white brownies...

... but the one that caught my eye was the recipe for coca-cola brownies. I've made coca-cola cupcakes many times before, and always loved them, so I was very keen to try these brownies. Unlike Nigella's coca-cola cupcakes, you don't melt the butter with coke and then add the other ingredients. Rather, you make the brownies like an ordinary cake, creaming the butter and sugar, then adding eggs, melted chocolate, and then the dry ingredients. At the end, you fold in a cup of coke and vanilla extract. As you can see from the above picture, after adding the melted chocolate, the mixture is very, very beautiful. It looks a bit lumpy after adding the flour and coke, but it all comes together in the end.

According to the recipe, this brownie is more "cake-like" than a normal brownie. But... it also says that you can make it more dense and fudgy by taking it out of the oven halfway during the cooking time and rapping the tin sharply against the oven racks. Which I did.

I sliced it while it was still warm, let it cool a bit more, and dredged it in icing sugar. There is a coca-cola frosting recipe in the book, but I didn't have the time to try it. And occasionally, I like to exercise a bit of restraint. Occasionally.















I ate some of the brownies the day I baked them, sharing them with my family and some friends. As for the rest, I packed them away in a container, to be frozen and eaten whenever I deem necessary.















I also served some up as a frozen dessert, with home-made vanilla ice-cream and raspberries.

These brownies were very nice - not as intensely dense as Nigel Slater's very good chocolate brownies, but a bit lighter, and still very chocolatey. As is the case with all brownies, the ones from the centre of the pan were more moist and more delicious than the ones from the edge.