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A couple of days ago I mentioned that I'm not very good at cooking desserts. The recipe here was adapted from the BBC website, with a few changes.

My workplace does a monthly Cake Day and this was our contribution. Emma actually did most of the work.

Brownies

• Take 3x100g bars of chocolate, broken into chunks (2x plain chocolate, 1x milk chocolate).

• Add 275g of butter or margarine.

• Melt the chocolate and butter either over a pan of hot water or in a microwave.

• Add 1tsp of vanilla extract.

• Stir in 325g caster sugar.

• lightly beat 4 eggs (or 20 quail eggs) and stir into the chocolate mixture.

• Sift 175g of plain flour and 1tbs of baking powder into the bowl and fold in gently.

• Add approximately 170g of peanut M&Ms (or the contents of a 185g bag with a few eaten).

Bake at gas mark 3 for about 25 minutes.

Frosting

• 55g butter, softened.

• 130g peanut butter. Mix with the butter.

• 120g icing sugar, sifted and stirred into mixture.

• Stir in about 1 tbs milk, to soften the mixture to a spreadable consistency.

The resulting cake was a bit sweet but the combination of chocolate and peanuts works very well and it's difficult to have just one piece.