Chocolate Brownies: Another Baking Post

I'm deviating from current trend of ranting about advertising campaigns to share with you, a little slice of heaven - if you will. Now I've made these several times and every single time - they've gone down like hotcakes (or hot chocolate brownies).

So here I share my recipe for the best non-shop-bought Chocolate Brownies you've ever tasted. So bake, eat, sit back and watch the love come rolling in.

• 225g Unsalted Butter
• 100g Dark Chocolate
• 200g Caster Sugar
• 3 Large Eggs
• 50g Plain Flour
• 50g Cocoa Powder
• Pinch of Salt
• White Chocolate Drops

To Decorate:

• 20g White Chocolate (melted and drizzled)
• 20g Dark Chocolate (melted and drizzled)
• Icing Sugar (to dust) 

   1. Heat oven to 180c.

   2. Put the butter and chocolate into a pan and heat slowly over a small flame until it's a beautiful chocolatey liquid of goodness. Something likes this;

   

   3. Put the sugar and eggs in a bowl and mix well.

   4. Whisk the above pictures saucepan full of buttery chocolate goodness in with the less-appealing bowl               of sugar and egg mix.

   5. Sift the flour, cocoa powder and salt into the bowl, a bit at a time, and mix thoroughly. Then stir in the white choc drops.

   

   6. Transfer the mixture into a 20.5cm greased square tray (make sure it's relatively deep).

   7. Top Tip - Bang the tray a few times to expel any large air bubbles.

   8.  Bake for 25 mins. You'll know when they're done when you poke a skewer or some-such long pointy device into the middle and it comes out clean. It should however still look squidgy - means they're moist, like all good brownies should be!

     

      

Enjoy and try not to eat them all at once.

The Orabrush Story - The importance of a brilliant brand campaign.

So I first stumbled across Orabrush during my exam period - I was probably waiting to watch a video of a man laughing at a goat climbing a ladder or a poptart cat flying through space when I was made to watch one of Youtube's obligatory 'unskippable for the first ten seconds' ads. Except I liked the ad so much I watched the whole thing, and then rather than watching the video I had originally intended I watched more videos about the Orabrush and I was fascinated.

The video that distracted me so much and pervaded my waking thoughts for the next few days was 'Orabrush: The Movie'. The video dramatised the story of the Orabrush and I found the whole thing so interesting that I felt compelled to research the company. 


Like all great ideas, it began as a small marketing campaign thought up by the 75 year old inventor of the Orabrush, Robert Wagstaff, and a marketing student from a local university. It soon went viral and had 15 million Youtube views, Orabrush then went on to create more Youtube videos and even launched their own channel, which now has over 39 million views. Their campaign was soon picked up by a manager of Walmart in the local area who decided to stock their product. This then expanded from one Walmart store to all the Walmarts in Utah, and then to Walmart headquarters who asked for the Orabrush to be stocked nationally.

This, for me, highlights the impact that effective use of social media can have, Orabrush went from selling no units as a small business in Salt Lake City to selling millions of units worldwide purely through Youtube and other social media channels (they have had over 300,000 downloads of their iphone app, ‘the bad breath detector’). What had started out as a marketing campaign directed at the general public soon became an effective business to business campaign. The Orabrush story demonstrates the importance of an effective marketing campaign along with the growing power of social media and internet media channels.

Not to mention it has a guy dressed up like a giant tongue. What more could you possibly want from an advertising campaign?!

Watch the video that started it all: