Chocolate Orange Fudge Squares

Hi everyone! I've decided to write this blog post for Louise as she's a school and I'm not. (In other words: she's doing important things with her life and I, currently, am not).
This is a recipe for chocolate orange (my favourite chocolate flavour) fudge squares. They're essentially brownies, with the added delight of orange cream cheese icing. Which is beautiful, by the way.

Makes: 16 squares
Time: 40 minutes + cooling

Ingredients:

175g butter, extra for greasing
200g dark chocolate, broken into cubes
200g dark muscovado sugar
3 large eggs, separated
140g plain flour
1 tsp vanilla extract
zest of one orange

ICING:
200g cream cheese
1/2 tsp vanilla extract. We also added some orange extract
50g icing sugar


Method:
1.
Pre-heat oven to 180 degrees C, gas mark 4.
Or turn the temperature up as far as it will go if you have a broken oven like us that only really does two temperatures: cold and hot.
Butter and line a tray-bake tin, around 23x23cm. Ours was slightly smaller so we had thicker fudge squares, which was nice.

2.
Put the chocolate, butter and sugar into a pan and heat gently for around 5 mins until smooth.
Leave to cool for 10 minutes,

3.
Add the eggs, flour, vanilla and half the orange zest to the chocolate mixture, beating the ingredients together as you go.

4.
Put the egg whites into a large bowl and whisk until they form soft peaks, like the beginning of a meringue. Stir a spoonful of the egg whites into the chocolate mix to loosen it (not entirely sure what difference this made when we were doing it, but never mind). Then fold in the rest of the egg whites.
(In our recipe it specifically stated 'with a metal spoon'. I would appreciate it if someone could tell me what the deal is with metal vs. wooden spoons but it made no difference to us so I'm not going to tell you what sort of spoon to use)

5.
Pour the mixture into a tin and bake for 25 minutes until evenly risen and firm to the touch. Cool in the tin, then cut into squares.

6.
Beat together the cheese, vanilla (and orange, if using), sugar and remaining orange zest until smooth. Spread over each chocolate square and serve.