Yesterday I decided to make box brownies for the girl's after school snack and for us to have after dinner last night. I've made these a gazillion times. Sometimes I "doctor" them up with chocolate chips, M&M's, heath pieces, etc. Sometimes I make them cake-like - which my family despises. But that's ok - I gratefully, dutifully take care of that problem. Sometimes I add a teaspoon of baking powder to the "fudge-like" recipe to add a little "body" to the brownie. (Kinda like cheating to get almost cake-like.)
Well, yesterday something went askew. Terribly askew. I bake my brownies on the convection setting on my oven. It's quicker and produces a prettier brownie. But my oven sounded funny - like the fan was hitting something. I looked at my brownies. They had "creeped" up the side and then fallen aimlessly back into the pan. When I checked them they were like thick soup. I quickly changed to oven over to conventional heat and finished baking. This might have played into the horrible outcome, this and the fact that I had sprinkled chocolate chips on top - but - I don't think so. At any rate, I took them out at the end of the bake time because they really, really looked BAD. I sat them on the rack to cool and checked them once more. They couldn't be cut because they were goopy on top and crisp on the bottom. This is where I discovered they were "seizing (I like this word) up" ! And they were seizing up fast!! And, I couldn't leave them to cool, either - because - you guessed it - they were "seizing up"! *Light bulb*! ! I would scoop them out, and serve them with ice cream. They would be hot enough to melt the ice cream and I figured the liquid would soften them up. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
You know it's bad when the men folk set their uneaten portions on the counter. Really, really bad. It was like eating something akin to peanut brittle, only chocolate. When Kelly came to get the girls, of course they filled her in on the outcome of their snack. Kelly picked at it and laughed at me. I told her I was going to dump them, it, later, so some unsuspecting, trespassing animal could have the pleasure of eating it,them. She politely told me my dish would break before I got said disaster out of it. "Sure", says I. Well. She was almost right. My dish didn't break, but it would have if we had kept at it, I'm almost certain of that. Bob brought it back in and said it just wasn't working. Those brownies were rock solid stuck! (did she jinx me?). Can it get any worse? Yea, it can.
I sat the pan in the sink and filled it with hot soapy water. Surely this would do the trick! Ben walks up beside me and asks me what I was doing. I told him about the difficulty we were having removing the brick from pan and I was going to "soak" it out. Adding insult to injury, he politely (notice how polite my kids are when I'm in a quandary!) told me that I would need something stronger than water. A solvent, like gasoline or turpentine to break it down! Gee, thanks, Ben.
I worked on it off and on until I went to bed last night. I got to face the beast this morning. Finally after many attempts and a sharper, longer, more stable utensil, I loosed the brownie from its glassy grave and sent it to "Brownie Brick Heaven"!
Below is just a small portion of what was left this morning. Ahhhh. . . . the joys of brick making!
"Stuck like glueYou and me, Baby
We're stuck like glue!"
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