Dessert storm

Between whisking me across country for some debauchery in the Nevada desert (which part of Nevada is not the desert, exactly?) and requiring me to help him move into the Metroplex, my dear beau has been prodding me to update my dadgum blog already! And I would have I suppose, if I hadn't also needed to attend a surprise substitute orientation and to take on a new position as evening aide to my autistic cousin in the midst of everything else. But things have finally slowed down enough that I was able to do one more nice thing for my beloved and then write this post about it, so pour yourself a tall glass of milk and enjoy!

Yesterday I made homemade chocolate chip brownies, and for the first time IN MY TWENTY TWO YEARS ON THIS EARTH I did not use a box of mix. You see, I made brownies all the time when I was a little girl, but since my ability to combine mix, eggs, water, and oil with fifty strokes of a wooden spoon always won me rave reviews, I never had any desire to make brownies the hard way.

But my familiar world of convenience baking came crashing down all around me last week when I decided to make Brownie Truffles to celebrate my sweetheart's first day at his new job. Sure, the recipe looked simple enough (melt some chocolate in that pot, beat some eggs in this bowl, pour into a prepared pan and twenty-five minutes later voila!) but it also looked like a RECIPE for BROWNIES. Until about eight years ago I didn't even know those existed anywhere other than on the backs of boxes of Duncan Hines: I thought brownie mix was as basic an ingredient as eggs or baking soda (which, coincidentally, does not have a place in scratch brownies. WHO KNEW!?). I was so intimidated that you'dve thought I'd never held a teaspoon in my life.

Since baking the brownies was only part of the truffle recipe (the other part involved rolling them into balls and covering them with cocoa power, instant coffee, and sugar) I finally convinced myself that I could use a mix for the first part and no one would ever know the difference. So I walked into my kitchen yesterday morning, opened the cabinet door, looked at the box of Ghirardelli mix (see, I even go for the fancy mixes!), and thought "If I call myself a baker, but am scared to make scratch brownies, then I'm nothing but a sham! That's it, if all of the ingredients for scratch brownies are in the house then I'm going to make scratch brownies!"

I've read tons of different food blogs and cooking magazines that extol the ease of making brownies the old-fashioned way, but I've always brushed the claims off as so much hooey. After all, food blogs and cooking magazines wouldn't have much of an audience if their writers didn't convince us that it really isn't that much easier to make everything from a mix. Except the food writers were sort of right: apparently it really only takes about five minutes longer to make brownies from scratch than it does to make them with a mix. And I can't speak for your relationship with your kitchen, but mine is more than happy to spend an extra five minutes a day with me.

[Technically a truffle, but really just a balled up HOMEMADE BROWNIE!]