Fudgey dark chocolate and tahini brownies.

Inspired by a visit to my new favourite ice cream parlour in the heart of Cape Town I felt compelled to recreate my flavour experience. For the past week all I could think and dream about is their mesmerizing Chocolate Tahini flavour with glorious nutty notes from the tahini paste and an unmistakable velvety smooth texture no ice cream I’ve ever had possesses. Feeling like I’ve been bewitched and in a chocolatey daze, I’ve taken the flavour combination and put my own twist on it.

I’ve tried the Lindt dark chocolate studded with toasted sesame seeds and is quite a favourite of mine, but never have I thought to pair chocolate with Tahini. It’s always those flavour pairings that we don’t expect to go together that end up blowing our minds and surprising our tastebuds. I tried making gluten-free chocolate cookies, a Nigella recipe using Buckwheat flour, dark chocolate and I added tahini. The recipe is from the book Simply Nigella, and seems rather interesting because of the toasty, nutty taste the buckwheat lends to the cookie against the tartness of the dark chocolate and the complementing nuttiness of the tahini too. The cookies were okay but didn’t quite get my stamp of approval to make the cut for a blog post( if you know what I mean)

The brownies are from a classic standard brownie recipe, of which I have tweaked a bit.

Ingredients:

-177 ml all purpose flour(I used cake flour as that was what I had on hand)

-177ml cocoa powder

-1 tablespoon instant coffee powder

-1/4 teaspoon salt

-1/4 teaspoon baking powder

-120g caster sugar

-2 tablespoons of tahini

-60ml Greek yogurt(plain yoghurt)

-2 tablespoons melted unsalted butter(cooled)

-2 beaten eggs

-1 teaspoon vanilla paste

-1 punnet of fresh raspberries.
Method:
Preheat oven to 180 degrees C. Grease a baking pan and cover in baking parchment. In a bowl, whisk the flour, cocoa, instant coffee powder, baking powder and salt until combined. I used my stand mix for this step, using the flat beater attachment, mix together the yoghurt, sugar, butter, eggs and vanilla until just combined then fold in half of the raspberries. Pour into prepared pan and spread evenly. Add the tahini in blobs and swirl around in the pan. Place remaining raspberries on top press in slightly. Bake for 20-25 minutes until the edges are crisp and the middle is set.

* if you don’t have instant coffee powder, add the same amount of granulated coffee to hot water then add at the end of the mixing process of the batter just before adding the raspberries.