The Brownie Debacle

Human Highlighter Suit Tally: 9

Milo takes after his mother in that he has managed to stretch his birthday celebration over an entire week.  Today is the day we are bringing goodies to his school so that he can celebrate with his classmates.  I asked him if brownies were okay, thinking this would be the easiest route.  Cupcakes require a level of detail orientation that does not run through my veins, and besides, I don’t have a cupcake pan.

“Sure,” Milo responded.

“Can I come to the party, too?” C.C. asked.

“Well, it’s during the school day, and you’ll still be in class,” I told her.

“Nikolaj went to his brother’s party at school.”

“Well… Milo, do you want C.C. to come?”

“Yup.”

“If it’s okay with Miss Melissa, it’s okay with me.”

My children do a great job of imitating the Hatfields and the McCoys most days.  Milo, like every other younger sibling I know, has perfected the art of annoying his sister just to the point that she goes over the line, while his hands stay clean.  Just last night, after we’d sent them to their room to put on their pajamas, Milo emerged, crying:

“What happened?” Alec asks.

“C.C. bit me in the butt!” he wails, tears streaming down his cheeks.

C.C., of course is right behind him.  “He was being a big fat meany-head!” she yells, in defense.

“Did you bite him in the butt?” Alec asks.

She looks down at the floor. “Yes.”

“Go to your room and take 5,” Alec says. 

“At least I tell the truth!” she shouts, as she stomps down the hall.

Alec turns to Milo.  “Milo, what did you do to make C.C. think you were being a big fat meany-head?”  (As if any kid who has just managed to get his sister sent to her room will admit anything.)

“Nothing,” he replies.  Of course.  Note his strategies:  Commit your crimes where there are no witnesses.  Take no prisoners.  Admit nothing.

If you are a younger sibling, an older sibling, or a parent, I am quite certain that you could write your own version of this script, direct from your lived experience.

 But when it comes right down to it, they’ve got each others’ backs. I know in my gut that C.C. wants to be there for Milo’s celebration at school, and not only because she gets to leave her class and eat brownies.  And Milo wants her there.  They are proud of each other.  And they are there for each other.  This gives me great comfort.

Although I love to bake and almost always bake from scratch, when it comes to brownies I usually use a mix.  My college roommate Anne-Marie became a chef after we graduated, and maintained that she had never found a brownie recipe that was as good as the mix she used.  I took this as carte blanche to use brownie mix, guilt free, for the rest of my days.

However, it’s not so easy to find brownie mix in Spain.  There are a couple of places that sometimes stock it, but not always.  It just so happened that we passed a cute little bakery in Madrid, and I popped in to see what they had.  Cupcakes in the glass case—the cupcake craze that has swept the US has begun to make its way across the Atlantic—and brownie mix on the shelves!  I bought a box.

Last night after the kids were in bed, I set about making the brownies.  The box conveniently had the instructions in English, but with metric temperatures and measurements, which also works for our current situation.  But there was a big sticker listing the ingredients in Spanish covering the part of the box that told what kind of pan to use, and how long to bake them.  Having had much experience with brownie baking, I greased a pan that approximated a 13 x 9 x 2 incher, and figured I’d start checking them after 20 minutes.

I mixed the batter with the eggs, the water, the oil.  Did you know that when the modern cake mix was invented in 1947, when women were being pushed back into the home after joining the workforce in droves during WWII, all you had to add was water?  (There was an earlier version introduced in the 20s, but it spoiled on the shelves).   It turned out that adding only water was a tad too convenient for the American housewife, so the producers changed the formula so that she would have to add eggs also, thereby making her feel as though she was really baking.  We are a gullible bunch, are we not?

I emptied the contents of my mixing bowl into the pan I had prepared, only to find that the pan was way too big for the amount of mix I had.  I started to laugh maniacally.  Alec, who was cleaning up the kitchen, asked “What’s wrong.” 

“Look!” I said, pointing, and still laughing.

“Huh, that doesn’t look good.”

If memory served me, one box of mix in the states either makes a small pan of thick brownies, or a larger pan of thinner ones.  I briefly considered spreading the mix as best as I could over the entire surface of the large pan.  “They’re only kindergartners,” I thought, “as long as I give them chocolate they won’t know the difference.”  But I quickly realized that I’d end up with brownie flavored crackers, and I might not even be able to extract them from the pan. 

So I found a smaller pan, transferred the batter, and baked them.  The problem was that there was no way I’d have enough.  As Milo had reminded me many times, I needed 19 brownies:  16 for him and his classmates, 2 for the teachers, and 1 for C.C.  I’d be lucky if I got 12.

It was too late to go to any store that would carry brownie mix—another difference between Bar Granja and the Brooklyn Bodega.  So I figured I’d cut my Friday workday short and go to the Fabulous Baking Company—another outpost of the cupcake invasion—after my meetings.  I was pretty sure they carried brownie mix.

I arrived at about 1 pm, with only two hours to purchase the mix, get home, bake the brownies, and get them to cool enough to cut.  At this point, I was feeling a little like Kate, the protagonist in Alison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It, which my friend Anne sent me right after C.C.’s birth.  It arrived when I was lying in bed with cabbage leaves stuffed into my nursing bra because my breasts were like boulders that hurt when I breathed, and I could not sit down without positioning an inflatable ring just so on my chair.  Kate is a working mother, and her struggles resonated a bit too much.  Anyway, one of my favorite scenes in the book finds Kate in her kitchen past midnight, having stopped at the grocery store on her way home.  She is supposed to send her child to school with baked goods the next day, and she has bought a cake or something at the market.  She’s standing there in her kitchen, in her office clothes, banging on the cake in the hope that if it does not look so perfect, it can pass for homemade. I cracked up when I read it.

I scan the shelves at the Fabulous Baking Company, and I see cake mixes, and cookie mixes, but no brownie mix.  Until I notice a separate display of beautifully packaged mixes, complete with wooden spoons tied onto them with gingham bows, that are clearly meant to be purchased as gifts.  One is a brownie mix—s’more brownies, to be exact—graham cracker bottoms and marshmallow tops.  It’s my only option, so I take it to the register and hand it over along with my credit card.  My jaw nearly dropped to the floor.  In fact, I cannot even tell you the price the clerk recited as she swept my card through, because it’s too embarrassing.   Suffice it to say I paid a bloody fortune.   But what choice did I have? Sometimes I really do feel like a stranger in a strange land. And I did not even use the marshmallows or the graham crackers because I knew that if I showed up with half plain brownies and half s’more brownies, all of the kids would want one or the other.  I’m no dummy.

I put the pan in the freezer to quick cool them after they came out of the oven, hoping they would not defrost the chicken nuggets underneath.  After an hour, I had to chisel them out. But they tasted good. And the kids loved them.  In fact, they ate them so fast I’m not sure they even tasted them.  And Milo had both his parents there, and his sister, and all of his new buddies.  So all was right with the world.  And by the time C.C.’s birthday rolls around, I’ll know better.