The Brownie Conqueror

 

I love fiddling in the kitchen, be it following recipes or trying to create a new gastronomic dish. Thanks to exams and all the midnight snacking, I have a very varied list of odd but yummy dishes to fulfil any palate. It’s also not very difficult to see why, since I have immense culinary talents from both sides of the family. My mom and dad are masters in the kitchen and they have generously passed this talent to all three of their children. Well more to me and my sister, my brother has yet to showcase any culinary skill other than mixing and stirring, and not to forget reheating.

I still remember the first thing I ever made. It was a chocolate cake, I was 14 and I messed it up bad. By messed it up I mean I forgot to add baking powder in it and the cake was somewhat flat and lumpy. It still tasted ok to me; I mean it had chocolate in it, so I forgot the baking powder, so what? But that was the extent of my disasters in the kitchen. I put the lumpy chocolate cake fiasco behind me and started afresh. Soon I was making all kinds of stuff, I forayed into different cuisines. Italian, Chinese, Mexican, Japanese, but my real joy was making desserts. Be it cakes, muffins, cupcakes, pies, you name it, I wanted to bake it. Whenever I saw a new dessert recipe I had to try it out, and luckily it used to come out quite good, except for one; BROWNIES.

Brownies were like a red mark on my culinary degree. Whenever I tried to make a brownie, it would end in disaster. They would come out black, burned, soggy, oily and so hard one could play football with them. I tried every damn recipe of brownie that there was, be it Nigella Lawson’s, Rachel Allen’s, Sanjeev Kapoor’s, Tarla Dalal’s, none worked. I got so frustrated I eventually gave up on them a year back, until my sister saw a new recipe and asked me to make them a couple of days back. I was hesitant and unwilling but my stubborn side (which is 90% or maybe even more) won and I put on my apron, wielded my whisk like a sword and went into battle.

First melt all the ingredients into submission

 

Then whisk them until they cry

Sieve the dry ones with an evil laugh

 

Spray the container to prepare them for the casualties

Use the last of your muscle power

 

And pop it in the oven at 180⁰ C

 

And viola the brownie is conquered

So how about you, conquered any desserts lately?