Easter Egg Brownies

My favourite Easter treat is Lindor eggs - they're the egg shaped offspring of the Lindor ball. I won't tell you how many I can eat in one go because you would look at me oddly. I was sent a bounty of goodies from Lindt and amongst them were nine Lindor balls. So you might ask, why are there only 5? Well, ok I may have eaten some already ... but with five Lindor balls you can still make a small batch of gooey, crunchy on top and soft in the centre melt in the mouth brownies.

The best thing is that these are really easy to prepare as brownies require no creaming or whipping or heavy equipment, just stirring in your saucepan. I used the base recipe from the Chocolate Chesnut brownies or Better than sex brownies originally from Celia but having no chestnut flour and considering I was supposed to be in bed, I made do with regular flour (although use chestnut flour if you have it and want to make gluten free brownies). I popped the Lindor eggs into the thick browniemixture and baked these in a loaf tin to make them a bit thicker. And then set the timer for 30 minutes and went straight back to bed. He was none the wiser until of course the smell of baking brownies gave me away....

"Who baked the brownies?" he asked.

"I think some brownie fairies came to visit! Isn't that nice?" I answered.

So tell me Dear Reader, what are you up to this Easter weekend? And what is your Easter chocolate of choice? I used to love those Humpty Dumpty eggs with the smarties inside.

Easter Egg Brownies

Makes 6-8 generously sized and rich brownies

• 90g (6 tablespoons) unsalted butter

• 300g (10 ozs) dark or semisweet chocolate

• 150g (¾ cup) sugar

• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

• 2 large (59g) eggs, at room temperature

• 40g (¼ cup) flour

• 6-8 Lindor eggs (or use any chocolate eggs you have leftover)

• 1 tablespoons Dutch process cocoa to sift over the top

Step 1 - Preheat oven to 175C/350F. Line a large loaf tin with parchment paper.

Step 2 - In a medium saucepan, melt the butter, then add the chocolate and stir over low heat until melted and smooth. Remove from the heat and stir in the sugar and vanilla until combined. Add the eggs in one at a time and beat until smooth with a wooden spoon. Add the flour and mix to combine.

Step 3 - Pour into the prepared tin and unwrap Easter eggs and sink these into the top-ideally you would add in one egg per square of brownie but I only had 5 at the time. Bake for 30-35 minutes. Allow to cool in the tin and then refrigerate for 10 minutes or so to firm up. These are gooey so they can be hard to cut but once they're refrigerated they set more and you can cut and serve them. Or....you can of course eat them while they are still melty and delicious and the egg insides are soft.