These are not just brownies. They're a lesson in cause-and-effect, and chemistry.
Will came home from school a few weeks ago, telling us about an assignment. He had to write a recipe for something, and he'd written one for brownies. And he wanted to take the recipe to the next level...he wanted to make them with Dad. Dad is the primary (I am hardly even the secondary!) baker of the household. So they made it a Wednesday "Guys Night" project while I was at knitting group.
The first step is to melt butter for fifteen minutes. Hmmmmm, even I as the "secondary baker" know that if you melt butter for 15 minutes, you aren't going to have butter anymore. You are going to have a scorched mess and a sad kid whose brownies have already taken a death blow in the very first step. So with a little tweaking (i.e. more cocoa, balance of ingredients) a pan of brownies materialized.
Surprisingly, they weren't too bad. Not the fudge-y, chocolate treat you usually have, but they rose in the pan and had some chocolate flavor. And my little scientist wants to keep tweaking the recipe, until it is worthy of The Notebook. The Notebook is a small notebook that I received as a shower gift, in it we copy any recipes that we really, really liked. We put a lot in it the first five years of marriage, now we're a bit more discriminate on what goes into the all-important Notebook. What Will doesn't know, though, is that his recipe is already Notebook-worthy. Just not in the way that he thinks, but in terms of preciousness.
