Brownies a la Telophase

[telophase]

Get Small-Batch Baking off bookshelf. Read through recipe quickly to ensure all ingredients are more-or-less present in apartment.


Decide to double recipe so as to have six two servings instead of three one (serving sizes are always optimistic and assume you can stop eating when there's brownie left sitting on the counter).

Grease two teeny loaf pans. Get out 2-cup measuring cup, thinking gleefully yet again that it's so cool that even a doubled recipe will fit in it. Recipe calls for room-temp butter, therefore cut up frozen butter, put in measuring cup with cut-up chocolate, nuke until melted. Stick one whisk into mixer, whisk.

Put in sugar, musing that there's only a little bit left and will have to get more, whisk. Add egg, unbeaten despite recipe insisting on 1 tablespoon plus 2 1/4 teaspoon beaten egg (doubled), because can't be arsed to measure egg that exactly and decide that one egg is close enough.

Realize that forgot to double sugar. Realize used all of sugar. Panic. Decide in for a penny, in for a pound, and go ahead with recipe anyway.

Realize that habit of forgetting what was purchased previously and buying 2 or 3 of any particular item has paid off in spades, because more sugar is sitting inside cabinet. Add rest of sugar. Add vanilla. Whisk.

Note that flour calls for 3 Tb plus 2 tsp and need to double it. Compute that it is 7 Tb plus 1 tsp, rather than getting more dishes dirty, go look up online how many Tb go into a cup (16), use 1/4 cup measure to put in slightly under 1/2 cup. Note that all bakers more serious than self are probably spinning in their graves.

Realize that only salt left in house is smoked salt, and do not want smoked brownies. Rationalize that butter is salted, when recipe called specifically for unsalted butter.

Whisk. Forget how strong batter is and let go of measuring cup while mixer still going, allowing measuring cup to spin wildly, throwing batter everywhere. Forget, in panic, that turning mixer off will help. Manage to grab hold of measuring cup before it rotates off counter, thus narrowly averting disaster.

Pour into loaf pans unevenly. Put into oven, actually preheated for once. Bake until metal skewer inserted comes out with only a little bit unbaked batter, because brownies usually come out dry. Put loaf pans on stovetop to cool.

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Comments

[fourthage.livejournal.com]

You forgot:

Make readers hungry for brownies when all stores are closed and no brownies are to be had until tomorrow.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

HEY! You didn't HAVE to click on that cut! XD I take no responsibility whatsoever! XD

I considered putting in the actual recipe I was following in case anyone wanted to do it, but got sidetracked and forgot to.

[melster.livejournal.com]

Haha. You bake wonderfully. :p

[telophase.livejournal.com]

And they even turned out edible, which always mildly surprises me.

[wordsofastory.livejournal.com]

Hee. You cook the way I do.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

It's family tradition. Mom and I tend to start in on recipes for which we only have half the ingredients. Once we get to the point where the recipe calls for, say, shallots, we tend to shrug and in the Spirit of Substitution [TM], throw in, say, potatoes, or a quarter cup mirin, or add more fish sauce.

Not because either of us is the sort of cook that knows much about how various flavors blend and interact with each other and thus makes educated guesses about what might work. No, we just throw in whatever the hell occurs to us at the time, which works surprisingly often. Can't do that with baking as much as with regular cooking, though.