Yes, this is indeed the perfect baker.

I spend a lot of time chopping vegetables. There I am at the end of the day, listening to public radio, chopping zucchini into toothpicks.  (What should I do with the zucchini in the garden? I’ve thrown a lot of it into a wok.)

I love vegetarian dishes, and that’s mostly what we eat.   Recently I posted a recipe for the most delicious dish I have ever eaten, Mollie Katzen’s Green Beans and Tofu with Crunchy Peanut Sauce.  At the end of the post, I added an “improv” shortcut.  It worked once; the second time it did not.

And that’s what makes me an indifferent cook.  The shortcuts.

I sympathize with Claudette Colbert in “The Egg and I”

If I am an indifferent cook, I am a mad baker.

No one cooked or baked when I was growing up.  My mother didn’t see the point.  Her mother had done all the cooking.  Her mother made delicious roast chicken, homemade noodles, delicately-cooked fresh vegetables, and Boston creme pie.  My mother proudly lived at home while she went to college and worked at her first job.  She never cooked or baked.

When she became a housewife, she liked one-step meals, possibly two-.  Tuna casserole, fish sticks, roast beef in an electric cooker.  I never saw a vegetable till I grew up and did my own shopping.  Well, that’s not quite true.  We had sweet corn.

She really hated baking.  “Cake mixes are better,” she told me.

When I bake them, they certainly are.

Once I made madeleines.  I could not understand the point of adding one ingredient at a time.  Why not add all the eggs  at once?  I ended up throwing everything in, butter, sugar, eggs, etc., and mashing it together.  The madeleines were probably not what the author of The Joy of Cooking had in mind.

Today I decided to bake brownies.  We had cocoa and the essential ingredients.  So I looked up cocoa brownies online, and found a delicious recipe at Bon Appetit.

I took no shortcuts today.  These are blue-chip brownies.   Forget baking chocolate or Hersey’s syrup! These are the best brownies I’ve ever had.

I would have liked vanilla ice cream with them, but you can’t have everything.

Here is the recipe:

nonstick vegetable oil spray
1/2 cup (1 stick) unsalted butter, cut into 1 inch pieces
1 1/4 cups sugar
3/4 cup Scharffen Berger natural unsweetened cocoa powder (I used regular cocoa powder)
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
2 large eggs
1/3 cup all-purpose flour

Preparation

Preheat oven to 325°. Line an 8x8x2 inches glass baking dish with foil, pressing firmly into pan and leaving a 2 inches overhang. Coat foil with nonstick spray; set baking dish aside.

Melt butter in a small sauce-pan over medium heat. Let cool slightly. Whisk sugar, cocoa, and salt in a medium bowl to combine. Pour butter in a steady stream into dry ingredients, whisking constantly to blend. Whisk in vanilla. Add eggs one at a time, beating vigorously to blend after each addition. Add flour and stir until just combined (do not overmix). Scrape batter into prepared pan; smooth top.

Bake until top begins to crack and a toothpick inserted into the center comes out with a few moist crumbs attached, 25-30 minutes.

Transfer pan to a wire rack; let cool completely in pan. Using foil overhang, lift brownie out of pan; transfer to a cutting board. Cut into 16 squares.

P.S.  I had no aluminum foil, so I simply greased the pan.  That’s not really a shortcut, is it?