The One Where She Posts a Recipe (Hey, at least she posted SOMETHING)

I haven’t written in a month and a half. It isn’t for lack of anything to talk about. I have several topics I could choose, and probably still will. Just to throw a few out there: The One Where Grandma Has an iPhone? The One Where She Learns a Few Things She Never Wanted to Know (I may not be able to write about that one. Too painful). The One With the Great Song. The One Where the iPhone Babysits. The One Where She Kills His Voice (and Wherein He Loses His Wallet). The One With the Month of Meeting Girlfriends. The One Where She Was Too Towny For the Rodeo. Oh… and The One With the Ant Attack. I don’t even know where to start. If you have one you particularly want to read about, just tell me, and I will start there.

But today is about food. Specifically, Chocolate Mint Brownies. If you know me, you know I am not a big chocolate dessert person. I love candy bars, but when it comes to brownies or chocolate cake or chocolate chip cookies, I am a big apple pie fan. There is a single exception. These brownies. Dense moist chocolate brownie, with a creamy mint layer, topped with a chocolate layer. I don’t even know what it is that gets me about them… it tastes sort of like eating dessert and brushing your teeth at the same time. But in a good way. A very, very, very good way.

One of my favorite things about visiting BYU campus is picking up a chocolate mint brownie from the Creamery on Ninth. But these are better. I used Ghirardelli chocolate. Just click on the link below for the recipe. If I had a macro lens for my camera, I would take a closeup that would make me feel like I lived in a chocolate mint world. I guess I will have to settle for just eating one. Or three.

Chocolate Mint Brownies

The One Where There is Spring in the Hair

LOOK at what I found awaiting me this morning in my e-mail! Yes… you too can wear a bird’s nest in your hair. Don’t get me wrong… I love J.Crew. You know how there are just certain stores that fit you? J. Crew is my go-to for just about everything except dresses and skirts. Just maybe not hats. Not that I was a hat person anyway, but lately my hair has looked a little like a bird’s nest, without any help from J.Crew. I don’t need any bag-lady fashion to help me along.

Oh, and if I am going to actually buy a bird’s nest, it is going to be this one filled with chocolate truffle-filled eggs, like this one from Williams-Sonoma... which I also found in my e-mail. It must be spring, you think?

The Totally Basic One

I don’t have much to say, but I couldn’t look at the picture of my witch claw at the top of my blog anymore. So… a recipe. It is the good old fall-back. You might recall that in “Little Women,” which is one of my favorite books, they all made fun of Beth because she didn’t have anything more interesting to post in their paper than a recipe. So mock if you will, but I have a cookie jar full of these, and you don’t. There are a few recipes that I have made so often that I don’t ever have to pull out a book, a recipe card, or consult my computer. This is one. I can throw it together so fast that I can pull a batch out of the oven before you can find your car keys and drive to the store and back with your sub-standard store-bought cookies. It is the good old Nestle Tollhouse recipe. I have tried a lot of others, but sometimes basic is the best. Click on the photo to enlarge… and then lean in… closer… now SMELL!

Chocolate Chip Cookies

The One With the Chocolate in the Charger

Once again, I am confronted with the realization that I cannot control my own fate. Okay, so I don’t really believe in fate, per se… but you know what I mean. The last week of August, I had to cater a wedding reception for 500. Usually I have a partner to cook with, and we can split up the tasks. Having a partner doesn’t make it twice as easy. It makes it exponentially easier... something more like twenty times as easy. I know that doesn’t totally make sense, but it is true. Maybe when I am catering with Fawn, she does most of the work! I hadn’t thought of that… I hope it isn’t true, but there it is. A distinct possibility.

So anyway, it was a Friday. I had done as much of the prep work as I could on Thursday. Alright, that is a lie. I had procrastinated a few things I could have done on Thursday, and they were coming back to bite me. It was two hours before the reception, and I was officially losing my sanity. I had co-opted the help of my 16-year-old son Dillon and his friend Sam, and we were running from place to place, dropping off supplies at the venue, picking up last-minute items at stores. I sent Dillon into a store with my credit card to pick up all the cut fruit for the displays, and I kept Sam to help me load my car quickly while Dillon was in the store. As we pulled away from the store, my mind was a snarl of stressful thoughts. I was imagining all the things I still had to do, and realizing there was not time to do them. Just then, I noticed a car backing out toward me. I was already passing her, and I chanted aloud, Don’t hit my car, don’t hit my car… and then CRASH. She hit my car.
Maybe it was just a little reminder. Things can always be worse. And after all, it is just a car. I really don’t care about cars. So this week my car is in the body shop being fixed. The lady’s insurance paid for a rental car, which happens to be this pretty sporty Dodge Charger. I have been enjoying driving around in it. Except this morning we got in it to go to church, and Skippy told me, Mama, I think you ruined your new car.

It is not ruined, exactly.

I had glazed two giant chocolate ganache cakes a couple of hours before the event I catered yesterday. When it was time to leave, they were still a little wet (translation: gooey chocolate bombs just waiting to go off). So we lined the back seat of the Charger with newspaper and set the cakes, still on a cooling rack, where they would not slide around. And they didn’t. All the way to Orange, thirty miles and three different freeways. All the way until the off-ramp thirty seconds from the venue. It was a shorter off-ramp than I anticipated. You know what? They still tasted good, and a little upholstery cleaning later, and you can barely tell at all. And you know what else? There are worse things. Ask any car rental place. I bet they will tell you that they practically never have people coming in to complain that their rental car smells like chocolate.

The One With No Cream Filling

Okay, so these don’t have cream filling. But they taste about a hundred times better than their Hostess counterparts. I am catering tomorrow. Wedding reception for 400. We needed something a little chocolatey to round out the dessert buffet, and so I made the Pioneer Woman chocolate sheet cake... except I made the recipe into cupcakes instead. It definitely captured Skippy’s attention.


By the way, I love to make this sheet cake. Unexpected guests? You can have this cake ready in 30 minutes start to finish, because you frost it while it is still warm, and because it is in a big cookie sheet, it cooks faster than a regular cake to begin with. And no one complains when you serve it warm, with a little ice cream.

So I have to get up early to cook. Going to bed now. Just thought I’d share the little bit of nostalgia. I’m a little curious to see if the resemblance makes the cupcakes more appealing, or less. Tell me... do they work for you???

Chocolate Sheet Cake (or 24 cupcakes)