The Aero ‘Perfect Pairing’ blogger flavour challenge

I was recently sent a very interesting email from the Aero press office team asking me to be involved with the Aero ‘Perfect Pairing’ Blogger food challenge. It sounded intriguing, so I read on…
To celebrate the new Aero Bubbles, Aero are challenging bloggers to experiment with food and come up with the ultimate, weird and wonderful flavour pairing.

I was sent a flavour pairing kit which contained a range of cooking utensils, a Flavour Thesaurus and some new Aero bubbles and chocolate for inspiration. Now, the thesaurus makes very interesting reading – there are food pairings in there that make me go mmmmm and some that make me go whaaaaaaat??! (Think bacon and chocolate, or cheese and peanut butter…!)
After some thought, and a long and drawn out consultation with the kids, we decided to go with a sweet and savoury mix up of chocolate…..and swede! 
Our thinking? Well, we wanted to try something a little bit crazy just to see if it could be done. We know carrot cake with chocolate icing works, so we stuck with a root vegetable and chocolate combo.

Next was working out exactly how to go about this weird recipe! We decided to go with a traditional chocolate brownie recipe, and somehow add some swede in there too:

Ingredients:

• 250 g unsalted butter
• 200 g good-quality chocolate (we used Aero)
• 80 g cocoa powder, sifted
• 65 g plain flour, sifted
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 360 g caster sugar
• 4 eggs
• 100g grated swede

Recipe:

Preheat oven to 180. Melt the butter and chocolate and mix until smooth. Add the grated swede and mix. In a seperate bowl, mix together cocoa powder, flour, baking powder and sugar, then add this to the chocolate mixture. Beat the eggs and mix in until silky smooth. Pour into a greased baking tray and bake for around 25 minutes.
Now just to make this even more unusual, we (and when I say we, I mean the children) decided to serve the brownies with raspberry sauce. I remained very unconvinced about all these flavour pairings, and sampled a very small slice of brownie – to be very very pleasantly surprised! They have a very ‘earthy’ taste which I assume is the swede, but somehow it works with the chocolatey-ness. And even the raspberry sauce works, adding a sharp sweetness to it all.

I am AMAZED that this combination works in any way, shape or form – but if you dont believe me, give it a try! To sum it up – once Jacob had demolished his plate full, I asked him what he thought of the recipe…..