Brownies, baby!

My name might as well be Betty MacGyver. I had another baking session cum mad science experiment last week, and the product was a batch of life-giving brownies. I'm actually really proud of myself!

I'd received what some might call a "motherlode" of bake mixes for Christmas (thanks, friends!) and no way to bring them to fruition! Since baking's not really a part of home cooking hereabouts, an extensive search of the department store/grocery turns up about zero baking pans. Ceramic and glass dishes have stickers on them depicting ovens with a big X on top. All salesladies advise against using any other kind of receptacle for baking, no matter how much it looks like Pyrex.

Now, I'm adventurous, but I'm still not about to put just any unknown alloy into my oven and risk ruining a chance to have delicious baked goods. Also, I realized that Man has been baking throughout the ages... uh... possibly since the dawn of time (hey), so if I tried thinking a little "outside the pan," I might be able to solve the problem without shelling out 3000 for a cast-iron skillet.

Not really sure why it didn't come to me sooner, but in the end, I went out and bought a roll of aluminum foil and fashioned my own roughly 8-in cirucular pan while watching a few episodes of Friends. It was awesome fun, and I really can't wait to do it again. And so simple!

Our fridge was still broken and therefore empty, so we had no eggs. I also wasn't willing to buy more than the one egg prescribed on the back of the box, since we had no good way of storing them. Fortunately, Alice's mom rules. She lent me a nice big egg and also took me to the new grocery store for a fresh jug of oil. I got soybean oil, because it seems slightly more novel and cost slightly less money.

The bane of all baking excursions for me is measurement. I am aware that it's mostly my fault for not just buying a measuring cup (there is a 4 cup measuring AND converting cup at the store for a couple hundred). So I wind up spending a lot of time beforehand looking up metric conversion utilities on the internet. Thing is, few companies mark the volume on containers anymore, and for those that do, I'm unsure as to whether it refers to the total volume of the jar/bottle or the actual volume of stuff they had in it. I went ahead and assumed the latter, so that I could rave about it more. There is a Tupperware cup we got for buying too much clothes one day, and that's 470 ml. I didn't really know how to do 1/3 c with that though. I had an idea that my French press might be 8 oz, and that our paper cups might be 4 oz, but after various internet searches failed to confirm either way, I set up a volume lab at the kitchen sink, and did me some interesting mental stoichiometry. I determined that my French press holds 12 c, and then was able to eyeball my liquids and bake some tasty treats.

It was only after everything was in the oven that I realized that my cough medicine came with a cap that measures 1 fluid oz, so I went back to test my hypotheses and discovered that my French press is actually 13 oz and our paper cups are a whopping 6.5 oz or something like that. It really blew my mind how little space an ounce actually takes up.

I know you're probably thinking that I thought about this too much... and I don't have anything to say about that except that you're probably right... but boy did I feel cool.

Then I gained like an inch of fat around my waist from eating too many brownies (although I did share like half the pan with other people, so don't feel too bad for me).