Tag Archives: Baking

Unsweetened chocolate for the fail

I’ve been making David Lebovitz’s brownies for years, and it’s a reliable and delicious recipe that just happens to be gluten free. I made them a few years ago for my pal, Emily, who is a chef, and she now sells them at her restaurant takeout counter, they are that good.

I always try to use Fair Trade chocolate and cocoa, but I needed a contribution to a meal for after a wake and didn’t have any chocolate on hand, so I raided my mother’s pantry. All my life she has had two boxes of Baker’s Chocolate on hand, a blue box of unsweetened and a red box of semi-sweet, but there was only the blue box, so I grabbed it and started baking.

Unsweetened chocolate is 100% cacao. It did not work. The chocolate Lebovitz suggested (bittersweet or semisweet) contain cocoa butter and sugar, which must have been what was missing.

Do make these brownies, and learn from my chocolate ignorance.

Snip and Sift

For all the new bakers and gardeners out there, two useful hints I’ve learned over my time dabbling in both pursuits:

  1. If you have planted more than one seed in a pot and only want one plant (think tomatoes and squash, not parsley or basil), snip the ones you don’t want with scissors rather than pulling them out. The roots of the little plants will often be intertwined and you’ll end up dislodging the one you want to keep as you tug out their potmates.
  2. Your recipe probably won’t tell you this, but always sift cocoa that is going into cakes or brownies. Even the freshest cocoa clumps together, and those clumps are hard to break up once you incorporate wet ingredients.
Bonus hint: make your own pots out of paper. There are ten billion online tutorials to help you figure it out. I roll mine around an old Keen’s mustard bottle. These are loofah seedlings because you should always try to grow something impossible to grow!

97

My mother and I delivered eight dozen sugar cookies that she baked and decorated herself to the vacation bible school group in Tyne Valley today, her 97th birthday. She said it’s not a big deal, but I think it’s kind of a big deal at her age, or any age, really! She wishes she could do as much as she once did, but she still does what she can, and that’s a great lesson for us all.

Everyone needs to feel needed, no matter what age or ability. When my caring responsibilities start to feel heavy, I remember times when I was alone and had no one who needed me, and I know that was much worse. Love and be loved, and make cookies.