Goats Cheese Brownies

Somewhere between adorning everything with pink and turning 23 the end of the month has snuck up on me. This leaves me in a bit of a crunch, so these Goat Cheese Brownies are an attempt to combine a couple of challenges.

The first challenge is Choclette's We Should Cocoa challenge, which is being hosted this month by Linzi at Lancashire Food. In the interest of starting a new year, the challenge is to pair chocolate with an ingredient that is new to your chocolate repertoire. Though I've often been intrigued by chocolate/goat cheese pairings on Chocolate Log Blog, for example Choclette's Goat Cheese and Chocolate Filo Triangles, I've never tried the combination myself.

                               

Next, I nearly forgot to enter my own challenge, Baking With Spirit. This month I challenged everyone to stave off the January blues by being frugal and only baking with alcohol in a way they see as saving money. Last January I bought mulled wine spices, thinking I would still be in the mood for mulled wine; I wasn't. This January I made mulled wine thinking that I would still be in the mood to drink it; I wasn't. Therefore, using mulled wine to make the icing which is drizzled oh-so-seductively over these brownies saved it from wasting away in the alcohol corner of my kitchen. Does mulled wine go off? Could I actually just have kept it until December? Thanks to this challenge, I'll never find out (at least within the next twelve months).

So, what do they taste like? The goat cheese adds a saltiness to the brownies, nicely counteracting the sugary brownie. The mulled wine icing adds a hint of fruit to the flavour, which I like but the topping can easily be left out of the recipe. I think I went overboard with the purple colouring, which I added to the icing to get a bit more colour; the mulled wine only gave a muted pink. Next time I think I'll stir the goat cheese into the batter rather than have it sit on top, but the crucial factor is that there will definitely be a next time!

Makes 18
Ingredients

• 375g Light Mayonnaise
• 200g Dark Chocolate
• 225g Plain Flour
• 3 Eggs
• 500g Sugar
• 75g Cocoa Powder
• 150g Goat Cheese
• 2 Tbsp Mulled Wine
• 100g Icing Sugar

Recipe

• Preheat the oven to 180C and line a brownie tin if you have one - if not, use a roasting tin (like me) or similar deep-dish tin.
• Melt the chocolate in a pan over a low heat, then stir in the mayonnaise.
• Take the pan off the heat and stir in the sugar.
• Add the eggs to the mixture. They are easier to stir in if you break the yolks first by stabbing them with the spoon.
• Fold in the flour and cocoa powder. Make sure you scrape the bottom to get any illusive flour.
• Pour the mixture into your tin and bake in the oven for about 20 minutes, then remove from the oven and sprinkle over the chopped goat cheese.
• Return to the oven and bake for another five minutes. Use a skewer to check how cooked it is; if it needs longer, check it every 3-5 minutes to make sure that it doesn't overcook and become dry. Remember that the brownie mix will continue to cook when it is taken out of the oven until it cools, so when ready to be removed from the oven the skewer won't come out completely clean but the mixture on it will be sticky and not runny.
• In a small bowl, stir the mulled wine into the icing sugar; add food colouring if the colour is not to your liking.
• Drizzle the icing over the brownies and leave to cool. 
• For easy-to-cut slices, chill the brownies in the fridge for at least 1 hour before slicing.