Brownie Puddle

Chocolate is very rich, but also very bitter. You need to add a conscience-troubling amount of sugar to sweeten it up to what we’re used to eating as “chocolate.” Add to that an absolutely jaw-dropping, positively heart-stopping amount of butter. And then some cream cheese. Only a symbolic amount of flour, just sort of as an afterthought. A generous helping of pecans. Poked through and filled with chocolate ganache that oozes out of the sides and bottom.

The result was the chocolatiest thing that I have ever eaten. So rich, it left my mouth raw…

It was my kid’s birthday and she wanted something chocolaty. I like to think of myself as the kind of teacher that remembers birthdays and stuff. Hehe~ But no matter what I do, I don’t think I’ll ever be deemed “cool” in her eyes. (Oh, if ever there was an exercise in futility, it’s seeking the approval of a child.) I made two small tarts with the batter; I just couldn’t hand over the entire hyper-activation glob to a kid. Besides, I believe in eating half as much, instead of using the 50%-version of ingredients (=crap).

I shared the second one with my friends, who said it would be nice to have on one of those days you crave something sweet. (Um, every day? I find that in this land, almost no one has a sweet tooth like mine!) I probably did most of the eating.

I think brownies were one of the things I missed the most when I first moved to Korea all those years ago; perhaps all that yearning was just a desire for some good-ole gut-clogging brownie. The world can’t be so bad if it created the brownie, but it seems like a terrible place if you know it contains brownies and you’re just separated from them… perhaps forever. Ah, what turbulent times they were. It’s good to be older, to have outgrown brownies somewhat, and to know that there’s no such thing as forever. There’s always an again, or at least its possibility. And of course, it’s nice to know that I can make myself a brownie whenever I want now :)