Simone Jester

I baked! Like REALLY baked! And not from a box mix where you just add eggs and water! (Though I'd have squeed about that before today.)

From scratch!

See, I made these chocolate crackles after Fizzy gave me the recipe. They were awful--I should've known anything with TWO CUPS OF SHORTENING (or coconut oil, which is what they use in Australia) in the recipe would be downright icky, but oh well. It wasn't actually awful, it was more like bland with a not-very-good texture. Aaaaaanyhow...

I did have to buy a few things to make them, and one of them was cocoa powder. And I was downstairs wondering what to have for lunch (or dinner, or whatever this meal is on my crazy sleep schedule), and the cocoa was still on the counter from when I made the crackles. I looked at it and there was a brownie recipe on the container, and I looked down the list of ingredients and holy crap I had all of them. What am I, some kind of adult or something? Did I REALLY have the ingredients for brownies just sitting around my kitchen for the past several days and here I was jonesing for brownies?

Yep.

So I followed the directions to the letter (except for the nuts, 'cause that was one optional thing that I didn't have) and made the brownies--and I added Andes Candies chunks that I'd gotten for cake-in-a-mug (next time I'll just get chocolate chips, mint in a cake is...odd), and even though the oven in my sixty-plus-year-old building is crap (but it's not sixty-plus years old, it's maybe...my age :P), they came out really well! And I tidied the kitchen and unloaded and reloaded the dishwasher while the brownies were baking, and cleaned off Frappucino bottles (which I'll be making candles from once Chris and I get to New York) while they cooled...and YUM!

So now there are two kinds of treats in my fridge. And Chris and Reid liked the chocolate crackles so they won't go to waste, so good news all around. :D