The Great Brownie Adventure

Okay, don't freak out about last night's rant. Thanks for the concern. It's just my written equivalent of childish foot-stomping. I can't do anything about it, I can't change anything, and nothing I do or don’t do (short of perhaps morphing into a boy) will help. But hey, adult here, so I guess I just have to fucking deal.

Being an adult sucks arse.

_________________________________________________________________________________

On a lighter note, to celebrate the handing up of a rather grueling piece of work which has made me a short-lived expert in Australian soil, antibiotics and fish fungus, I gave myself the day off instead of trying to become an expert in yet another thing, and resolved to make brownies to eat while I watched 'House'. I need the chocolate fix.

It was supposed to be really simple. But when it comes to baking, it seems that I'm completely incapable of following a recipe without wanting to get creative. Witness that ever-popular incident where I attempt, with the help of an accomplice, to bake cinnamon rolls. Not pretty.

But I conveniently forget all about that in my anticipation of warm fudgey goodness. Brimming with optimism and that particular brand of good humor one is suffused with when faced with the promise of vast consumption of chocolate baked goods, I bounced happily into the kitchen despite the fact that I had gotten a mere seven hours sleep in the last two nights. I blame the eye bags for my short-sightedness.

It was all going really well. Butter, check. Sugar, check. Baking powder, salt, vanilla essence check. Ooh, flour, yes, of course. No sludgy mess of unbakeable cocoa goo for Slinky, I'm smarter than that, haha! Check.

And then my eyes fell on the tub of treacle that was sitting on the communal shelf,
where we all put stuff that we're happy to share with ach other. Treacle. It's something that you read about in Enid Blyton books when you're a little kid, and it's been built to epic gastronomic proportions. It represented a near-mythical, magical world where you and It would travel magical lands and have cake in Mallory Towers while munching on treacley........things. I looked at the treacle. The treacle looked back at me. And said, "Use me". And so I did.

Have you ever played around with treacle? The one outstanding quality about it is that it's mindbogglingly thick. It's like spooning up liquefied tar. God help me, but driven by gastronomic childhood hang-ups, I painstakingly dug out two heaping teaspoons of treacle, nearly losing my spoon to the thick goo in the process, and smacked it into the butter and began pretending that I was Auguste Escoffier (assuming he would condescend to make brownies), mixing like mad.

Then the mixing slowed down because the butter/treacle mixture started getting really thick. It was like trying to mix concrete with a teaspoon. I was beginning to worry that I would break the spoon. But I persevered.

Then I started mixing in the dry ingredients. If you were standing outside my kitchen and you didn't know what was going on, you'd have sworn that I was weightlifting. There was, I am ashamed to admit, some effortful grunting.

When I was done with the mixing, there was this thick, paste-like chocolate-colored glop at the bottom of my mixing bowl. I've baked brownies before, and the mixture's always been able to drop off the back of a spoon. This time, it looked like it would eat the spoon. I stuck my spoon in experimentally and let go. My spoon stuck right out of the middle like a little flagpole. Risking potential loss of digits, I stuck my finger in and scooped up some of the brownie mix. I attempted to scoop it up anyway. That shit was sticky. Thinking about it now, perhaps putting my finger into my mouth could have ended up in disaster. I would have looked like one of those kids who had been playing with Superglue and stuck their finger to their mouths.



But I tried some, and was hit by a heavenly chorus of chocolate angels bearing cocoa powder on their little milk-chocolate wings. It tasted good. Heartened, I reasoned that perhaps I could help it along, and proceeded to add milk to the mix to try and thin it a little.

Did any of you ever play with Mad Scientist Slime when you were a kid? Because this reminded me of it. I would add milk, and the mixture would appear to thin a bit… and then like an elastic substance, it would suck up all the moisture and thicken again. It was almost magical. I felt like calling a biochemist over to ooh and aah at my physics-defying creation.

Finally I managed to pour in enough milk to make it of what thought was an acceptable consistency (note: the recipe didn't call for any milk at all, but then again, it didn't call for any treacle either and I didn't listen the first time, did I?)

I bunged it in the oven and set it for 30 minutes like the recipe stated.

At the end of thirty minutes, I peeked into the oven. And poked tentatively at the brownie. It wobbled. I hastily shoved it back in and set the timer for another ten minutes. And another ten. And another five.

Finally, after many exploratory jabs with a toothpick when I was convinced that I would not upend the cake tin to end up with third-degree burns on my hands from boiling liquid brownie mix, I took it out of the oven and removed it.

And a rewarded with rich, warm, chocolatey......cake.



Yes, cake. Not brownie.

Huh. I'm going to eat the whole thing (at least it's really good cake) while watching House tonight and try again tomorrow.