Gluten Free Halloween Brownies

Clutter Of Spiders (Thankfully Plastic)

It might seem a bit odd, but these Halloween Brownies started out being developed as Halloween Ghost Meringues. How? You might ask.

Well. It all started fine, I separated the first egg by transferring the yolk from shell to shell and letting the white drip into my bowl. As I broke the next one The Persian let out an almighty MWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA (for the Pumpkin cooking) and I - in a startled fashion - dropped the entire egg (including the 2 halves of shell) into the white I had just separated.

That's okay I thought, I removed the shell and put to one side knowing I could use those eggs for something else.

With a still screechy Persian about I decided to do the egg separation with the bottle trick. You know the one right? Where you break the egg onto a plate and suck the yolk up with a plastic bottle. Here it is anyway;

Easy pease right?
Na ah. Not easy one little bit!
I started trying and nothing happened except the yolk would go into the bottle neck a tiny bit, then it would just plop back out again. So The Glutenite tried, with Evian and Volvic bottles of different sizes. He could get the yolk fully into the neck of the bottle but as soon as he did it would slide straight back out.
In the end we both gave up and we're still none the wiser except that apparently you have to use a bottle that hasn't been squished - which we didn't!
I personally feel a bit like a village idiot, especially after seeing that video of a child owning it.
So that's how the Halloween Brownies came about, I was over trying to separate any more eggs that day.

The Yummy Result Of Much Frustration

Ingredients:

2 Eggs

85g Butter

65g Gluten Free Self Raising Flour (Doves Farm used here)
50g Cooking Chocolate (I used Hasslacher's 100% Cacao) 90g Caster Sugar Pinch of Sea Salt
I know, I did baking. I'm still a bit in shock.
Directions;

• Preheat your oven to 160C Fan / 180C Conventional
• Break the eggs into a bowl and beat 
• Add the flour, sugar and salt and mix
• Put the butter and chocolate into a bowl and microwave for a minute or so until melted - keep watching. Or put the bowl over a saucepan of boiling water and melt it that way.
• Pour the butter and chocolate liquid into the egg mixture and stir until even

What Should Have Been Meringue

• Line a baking dish with baking paper (I used a pyrex 8.5" x 6.5") and pour the brownie mixture in
• Put into the oven for 30 minutes

Wait, That's Not A Meringue Ghost!

• Take the brownie slab out of the dish by lifting the paper and leave to cool on a wire rack
• Cut into squares and decorate as you wish

Lovely If I Do Say So Myself

I ended up with 18 quite large pieces. The intention was to decorate the Brownies using some homemade stencils but I didn't have any icing sugar and neither did the local shop, so that's why the spiders. Not my first choice of decoration given recent events.
If you're wondering if I'm going to attempt the Meringue Ghosts again, I already did.
It was not my finest hour.

I KNOW

The white ones were meant to be the Ghosts, the things above them Tombstones (I even used food dye) and the sorry states on the left were my attempt at Meringue Bats.

So first off there's my total lack of creative piping skills, then the fact that I had the oven too high. I don't know if I could take such a failure again so soon so we might just have to forget about Meringue Ghosts this year.

I'm currently in immense wisdom tooth pain and have been for days, so I'm not sure if there will be any more Halloween posts this year, but maybe. I am kitted out this time.

(I have glow in the dark nail polish, this excites me greatly!)