Random Recipes - Triple Chocolate Crunch Bars

Every month Dom at Belleau Kitchen challenges bloggers to cook a recipe chosen at random from their collection of cookery books - and I have to admit, I haven't been brave enough to take part until now! I don't bake as much as some people and try to make things for particular occasions (eg visiting family, or a birthday) so don't want to leave what I cook entirely to chance, and also I'm pretty fussy so there's a chance that if I picked something at random I wouldn't actually like it!

I took part in Dom's challenge last month as it didn't involve baking - he asked us to take a photograph of our cookery book collections, which actually inspired me to reorganise mine after seeing how tidy other people's were! So then I decided I would take part in the proper challenge this month and cross my fingers and hope it was something I would like....

I counted my recipe books and used a random number generator and then counted along the shelf until I got to that number book. So far so good.... it turned out to be the Fairtrade Everyday Cookbook, edited by Sophie Grigson. My friend Alice gave me this book a couple of years ago and I haven't cooked much from it, so it was a good one to use - and it has a good selection of recipes.

I opened the book at random, hoping it would be something I liked..... and Dom probably isn't going to believe me when I say my first ever random recipe was chocolate cake! Hooray! More specifically, triple chocolate crunch bars. I didn't cheat, I promise!

There weren't many ingredients needed and this was a pretty simple recipe too. You need:

250g butter, softened
200g caster sugar
3 eggs
200g self raising flour
50g Fairtrade cocoa powder
50g Fairtrade dark chocolate, chopped
50g Fairtrade milk chocolate, chopped
50g Fairtrade white chocolate, chopped.

I used Green and Black's but there are plenty of other Fairtrade chocolate bars around you can use.

Preheat oven to 200C. Cream butter and sugar then add eggs.

Fold in the flour and cocoa powder

Chop the chocolate

Add to the mixture and fold in

Grease and line a tin. I was recently sent Dr. Oetker's cake release spray to try and review. I usually use a spray oil like Fry Light that I use for cooking to grease my baking tins, as I find it a lot easier than rubbing butter around the tin. I assumed this cake release spray would be pretty similar, but it was slightly different. Fry Light sprays a small amount in quite a targeted area so I have to spray each tin several times. The cake release spray was a more continuous spray that covered a much wider area and left a finer coating of oil, which I was pleased by. I had no problems removing the cake from the tin (I also used greaseproof paper) and I have to say I think I will be buying this again. It will be interesting to see how long one can lasts!
(Disclaimer: I was sent this product free of charge but was not required to write a positive review).

So where was I.... spread the mixture into the tin

Bake for 20-25 minutes

The recipe suggests cutting it into 8 slices but these would be massive! I decided instead to cut it into squares, much like chocolate brownies. I like how you can see the different coloured chocolate chunks inside the bake.

I found these a little dry as I think I was expecting them to taste like brownies, but the different taste and texture when you eat a chunk of chocolate inside was really nice (I left the chunks quite big so they wouldn't entirely meltaway). My boyfriend loved them and while I think we do both prefer brownies, this is a really nice change and I'm very glad I picked it as my random recipe!