Why my brownie has oil on the top when baking

[Octavia09]

Ok, I have had it a few times already. The recipe (Nigella Lawson's) is to melt the chocolate and butter, when the chocolate is cooler I add eggs with sugar; then the flour.

It has happened a few times that the mixture becomes kind of glossy and when it is baking I can see butter is on the top of the cake. When the cake is baked there is still butter, it is somehow becomes an oily brownie.

I think it could be because the chocolate and the butter were melted longer than it should be. I do not usually add eggs to the very hot chocolate. I leave the mixture to cool for about 10 min.

Has anyone experienced something like this before?

It could be that the recipe is a duff one. Some of these celeb books are very poorly-tested. Have you compared it with any other brownie recipes? Maybe the proportions are out? Too much fat in it or something.

This happened to me with the Hummingbird ones, you have to be careful with your choice of chocolate and butter, don't use cheap butter, I use lurpak unsalted and Tesco's choclate which is about 74% cocoa.

This has never happened when using Lindt chocolate and the brownie becomes delicious and light. Once I tried Waitrose chocolate and it failed; this time I tried Tesco 85%. I wonder whether this happens because of the ingredients which when melt with butter produce something so sticky that butter does not get mixed in anymore. Lindt is great but I need 375 g and the chocolate has become ridiculously expensive.

There is a thread running about brownies at the moment, I like the Hummingbird ones, only 200g choc and others swear by Nigel Slaters so you could try and find that one.

Ok, thanks. WIll have a look for that thread. The Nigela's brownie is nice, I can tell you but I do not add 1 tbs of salt as in the recipe. May be it is because of the chocolate and butter.

I always make nigella's brownies(snowflaked brownies from 'feast') I haven't had this problem.
Maybe it is the chocolate or the butter, I use sainsburys dark chocolate and yorkshire butter.

I'm not kidding myself this is a special combination, just offering it up as evidence that the recipe isn't inherently duff.