Brown Sugar Topped Squares: or, I would have written this down too

You never know what will turn up in boxes that no one has ever opened.

Brown Sugar Topped Squares         First layer: ½ cup butter (or ¼ cup each of butter and shortening) 1 cup dark brown sugar 1 egg 1 egg yolk (save white for topping) 1 tsp vanilla 1½ cups sifted flour ½ tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt         Topping: 1 egg white 1 cup dark brown sugar Heat oven to 325°. Grease a 10"x15" jelly roll pan. For extra insurance, cut a piece of baking paper to fit the bottom of the pan before greasing it. Afterward, press the paper firmly into place, eliminating as many bubbles as possible. Then coat the top of the paper with cooking spray. Cream the butter and sugar. Then beat in the egg, the yolk, and the vanilla. Beat well. Then sift in the flour, baking powder, and salt. Mix everything together. Place into the pan and spread to the edges. This is easier if you coat the top of the dough with cooking spray and then pat it out. (You may need to re-spray it a few times if it sticks to your hands.) Set aside. In a clean bowl with clean beaters, beat the egg white until it forms stiff peaks. Gradually add the sugar, then beat well. Pour this onto the dough and spread it to cover. Bake about 30 minutes. Cut into squares or bars while warm. Source: handwritten note

I was recently dog-sitting for my parents. It's like getting to briefly enjoy the fun parts of dog ownership without the whole "lifetime commitment of responsibility" thing. A few days before I arrived, my mother said that when she was going through some boxes that have followed us through multiple moves, she found a whole binder of recipes in my great-grandmother's handwriting. She left it out for me to look through. The binder rings were long broken away, and the pages were so brittle that they shed little pieces of themselves no matter how carefully I turned them.

This comes from the same great-grandmother whose graham cracker cake literally fell into our hands on a paper scrap. At the time, I was surprised to get a single recipe from a relative I never met. An entire binder of them was more than I ever thought possible. She even put a table of contents at the front of it. Of course, by the time the book turned up, the pages were out of order and randomly stuffed in there. 

Her handwriting was this good. A few decades later, my teachers demanded typed drafts of my essays because they couldn't read them otherwise.

She had a mix of newspaper clippings, glued-down food labels, and handwritten recipes-- some of which are attributed to people I'm pretty sure are relatives. The handwritten ones are surprisingly detailed and easy to understand. You don't always find that in personal recipe books. (I only put in that kind of effort when I'm giving a recipe to someone else.) This binder looks less like someone's personal notes and more like it was meant to be found and used by somebody else. Then again, she was a teacher with terrifying stare, and also organized enough to put a table of contents at the front.

If we carefully flip through the pages, we find multiple recipes for prune whip. Maybe she liked prune whip the same way I like brownies, and had different ones for different occasions. Perhaps one prune whip is the fastest but not the best, another one uses better spices but is a bit fussy to put together, another one has the perfect texture but also takes a while to make... etc.

Not going to lie, a salad with hot dogs on top is probably amazing.

Looking elsewhere through the book, most of the recipes are for desserts. This kind of surprised me, because the surviving photographs of the lady herself show someone who looked too grim to ever permit frivolous sweets, much less make them. In pictures, she almost always looks ready to frighten the disobedience right out of you unless she's with her husband, in which case she just looks tired. 

But despite appearances, she may have liked sweets a lot. We found a lot of various personal effects organized in old chocolate boxes when we cleared out the house. There were a lot of chocolate boxes. Some of them were double-decker sized.

 Getting back to the book, the recipe for "pineapple dessert" involves mixing marshmallows into canned pineapple and letting them dissolve overnight. A decade or two later, the instructions would probably end with a note like "reduce marshmallows to serve as a salad." Now, I always thought of these people as "the relatives from Chicago." For some reason it never occurred to me that if they lived in Chicago, they were therefore midwestern--- marshmallow dessert/salads and all. I sent this page to a friend who lives in Michigan, who said "I've made that pineapple dessert!" I was further informed "It's pretty good!"

The instructions for the "lemon sponge" on the same page suggest that apparently she made it a lot. She wrote down the original ingredients, and then rewrote them in quantities to feed like fifty.

Other recipes of note include two recipes for "Irish moss blancmange." At first, I thought "Irish moss" was meant to be a poetic, evocative title. Like, no one today thinks "dirt cake" contains actual dirt. But both of the Irish moss blancmanges start by literally boiling Irish moss. I thought this seemed weird until I learned that "Irish moss" is what we now call carrageenan, which is still used the same way today. Anyway, I'm not sure if this recipe was some sort of Irish pride thing, or perhaps a vegetarian option for serving gelatin during Lent. (They were very Catholic.)

Naturally, I couldn't resist making something as soon as I finished looking through the book. What good is my parents' counterspace if I don't cover it in splatters while I'm here? I zeroed in on this recipe because I love brown sugar in all its exquisite forms. As I read the instructions, I wondered if this would be like a molasses-tinged variant of the Blitz Forte. After all, both of them are cookie dough baked under a meringue.

I love the change in handwriting halfway down the page, suggesting that she let one of her kids carefully copy a recipe off the back of the Quaker Oats can into "the big recipe book."

You may notice that I used light brown sugar even though the recipe specifies to use dark. As much as I like making recipes exactly as written, there was no dark brown sugar at hand. I could have gone out to the grocery store, but the weather was cold, wet, and miserable. I would have poured in a little bit of molasses to make up for what we lacked, but there wasn't any in the kitchen. (Really, I think every kitchen should have molasses in case of a brown sugar emergency.)

Our dough soon looked like we were making blondies. Even though our ingredients didn't quite match what was written, we could at least see that the recipe worked. Also, the dough tasted so good that I regretted preheating the oven.

After mixing, we are directed to spread the dough "thinly" onto a 10"x15" jelly roll pan. I don't have one of those, but a little bit of math told me that a pair of 9" square pans are about the same total size. As you can see, two 9" squares are only a smidge bigger than the pan we're supposed to use.

I have never used calculus, but I have to admit that all of the math classes from 8th grade and earlier have been very useful in my daily life.

I didn't think an 8% pan size difference would matter until I saw how tiny the dough looked.

This is not a recipe where you can eat a lot of the dough. I had to completely clean the bowl with a rubber spatula. And when that wasn't enough, I had to scrape the very last spoonful of it from the beaters. Even then, I barely coaxed it to the edges.

After that the dough was pressed as thin as it would get, I cracked our single egg white into the bowl and thought "This is supposed to cover all of it?"

Things looked more promising after I whipped the egg white to a voluminous froth, but I still had my doubts. Even if I had my great-grandmother's correctly-sized pans, this lone egg white would have to cover 150 square inches of dough. (That's 968cm² for our metric friends.)

Although brown sugar meringues are pretty common, this is my first time making one. You'd think I would have made one sooner just because people call them "seafoams," which I think sounds charming. But even though I liked the idea of a brown sugar seafoam and was excited to make one, I didn't think the recipe we had written in front of us would end well. I've found that a cloud of whipped egg whites can only take so much sugar before collapsing into a goop. Which this did.

Granted, our topping was slightly more whipped than before I put the egg white into the mixer, but not by much. Also, it was easy to smear this runny mess on top of the rest of the recipe. I didn't manage to completely cover our cookie dough, but that didn't bother me. As we all know, whoever trims off the ugly edges after baking gets to eat them.

To my surprise, the cookie dough managed to puff up a lot. But since the dough had started out looking like either crackers or pie crust, it was still quite thin after baking. I wondered why my great-grandmother didn't use a smaller pan than this. Maybe she needed to stretch the kitchen budget as thin as the dough in the pans. Or she might not have wanted the cookies to be too indulgent. Or perhaps it was laziness: "There! That'll do the kids' lunches all week!"

I may have baked these slightly too long. Even though I followed the instruction to cut them while warm, I had to use a lot of force. Also, that top layer was unexpectedly fragile. It crumbled to powder wherever the metal spatula went. (It was easier to chisel straight down with a spatula than to use a knife.)

These were like brownies only a lot more so. The bottom layer was wonderfully dense and chewy. The top layer started off powdery and then melted in your mouth. It was like that crackly layer on top of brownies but a lot more so. I hesitate to say the top layer was like candy coating or frosting, but it definitely suggested both.

But as much as I liked these, they would have been better with dark brown sugar. I wish I had added cinnamon to the bottom layer to make up for the loss. However, I didn't tip these into the trash. Instead, I put them onto the pretty glass cake plate for when my parents returned. For one thing, my mother really likes it but doesn't use it very often. Also, this cake plate is relatively small, which meant we had to stack the cookies into a tall pile on it. This helped them look less thin.

I will definitely revisit this recipe with the dark brown sugar that is specified, but it was still good with what we had on hand. I'm also pretty sure that reducing the pan size to 9"x13" won't hurt a thing. Besides, I think more of us have 9"x13" pans in the house than jelly roll pans.

Bangor Brownies: or, We finally had too much molasses

I saw the truly insane usage of molasses and had to do it.

Bangor Brownies 1 cup flour 1 tsp baking powder Pinch of salt ¼ cup melted shortening 1 cup molasses 1 egg 2 oz unsweetened chocolate, melted* 1 cup nuts, if desired Heat oven to 325°. Spray a 9" round or 8" square pan. Line the bottom of it with paper cut to fit. Then spray the top of the paper. Sift together flour, baking powder, and salt. Set aside. Mix together the shortening and molasses. Then add the egg and the chocolate, beating each ingredient before adding the next. Beat well. Then stir in the flour. Add nuts last. Pour into the pan and bake about 15-20 minutes, or until firmly set. Turn out of the pan as soon as you take it out of the oven, and cut with a sharp knife. *If desired, you can substitute 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder. Increase the shortening by two tablespoons. Note: We recommend omitting the chocolate. Instead, add spices like cinnamon, ginger, and nutmeg. The Metropolitan Cook Book, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, via Mid-Century Menu

The Metropolitan Cook Book, Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (via Mid-Century Menu)

As I've said before (and often), I like molasses so much that I pour it onto waffles. And look at how much we're using today!

With normal, molasses-free brownie recipes, the batter isn't this dark until after you've added the chocolate. But this recipe uses a truly glorious amount of molasses. 

I thought I might have a good gingerbread recipe on my hands, so I split the batter in two before adding the chocolate.

As the brownies baked, I couldn't help wondering what made these distinctly "Bangor" brownies. Is it the molasses? I quickly found another recipe for Bangor brownies. Even if you swap the sugar for the molasses, the two recipes aren't the same.

Mrs. Mary Martensen's 1933 Century of Progress Cook Book, via The Internet Archive

And so, I went to Food Timeline and learned that the town of Bangor, Maine figures prominently in the (surprisingly hazy) early history of brownies. The earliest "Bangor Brownies" they had (dated 1912) are completely different from either of the Bangors we have already seen. But it seems like aside from today's recipe, molasses doesn't really go into Bangor brownies.

When I checked on the brownies at the end of the recipe's 15 minute baking time, I grimly suspected that I would soon dump them into the trash. When your hot batter is bubbling and oozing like a pan full of simmering spaghetti sauce, you usually have a failure in the oven. I was utterly furious at wasting chocolate and nearly half a jar of molasses.

I gave the brownies an additional 5 minutes because I figured the oven was already heated and the "brownies" were already in it. Also, I wasn't ready to face the hot pan of ruined grocery money. At the end of the extra time, I found that the batter had set. However, it looked less like brownies and more like hardened mud. I was ready to dump the entire pan into the garbage can, but I didn't want to melt the trash bag.

I only cut the brownies as a formality, but they had a surprisingly good texture. I expected a gummy hardened paste, but they somehow had become a light and fluffy gingerbread. The molasses-only side of the pan was only a few spices away from being really good. This may be worth exploring further.

However, I wasn't impressed with the chocolate brownies. The chocolate and molasses tasted like they were at war with each other. I thought they would meld into something beautiful and they absolutely did not. I never thought I'd say this, but I think this brownie recipe is better without chocolate.

Brownies from Yvette's: or, Of course I took away chocolate from a website with aliens

Let's talk about the early days of the internet. Or at least, the first days it was open to people who couldn't write computer code. Every house's mailbox was full of those AOL promotional CDs. (Seriously, AOL CDs were so inescapable that they spawned their own genre of craft projects.) The phrase "social media," if it existed, was still tightly locked up in conference rooms. No one had heard of "search engine optimization," and only coders used the word "algorithm."

Double Fudge Cream Cheese Brownies        Brownies: 1 cup butter or margarine 4 (1-ounce) squares unsweetened chocolate* 2 cups sugar 4 eggs 1 tsp salt 1 tsp baking powder 2 tsp vanilla 1½ cups flour 1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips        Filling: ¼ cup sugar 2 tbsp butter or margarine, softened 3 oz cream cheese, softened 1 tbsp all~purpose flour 1 egg 1 tsp vanilla         To make the brownies: Heat oven to 350°. Grease a 9"x13" pan. To make the brownies, place the butter and unsweetened chocolate in a large saucepan over medium heat. Cook, stirring constantly, until melted. Remove from heat and mix in the sugar. Beat in the eggs one at a time. Then add vanilla, salt, and baking powder and beat very well. Mix in the flour, then stir in the chocolate chips. Set aside.         To make the filling: In a small bowl, beat the sugar, butter, cream cheese, and flour until light. Then beat in the egg and vanilla.         To assemble: Spread half of the batter into a pan. Spread the cream cheese mixture on top of it. The filling won't completely cover the brownie batter. Then spoon the remaining batter all over all, and spread it to cover. Bake for 30-35 minutes, or until brownies begin to pull away from the sides of the pan. *If desired, you can substitute ¾ cups cocoa powder. Increase the butter to 1¼ cups. After melting the butter, stir it together with the sugar and cocoa. Then proceed with the rest of the recipe as written. Yvette's Bridal Formal

No one in those days worried about their "engagement stastics" or their "presence." Website layouts hadn't yet been standardized. When discussing webpages of the early modern era, it is contractually mandatory to deploy the phrase "it was like the wild west." Let it not be said that I neglected my cliched duty. 

This brings us to one of the ancient legends of terrible web design: Yvette's Bridal Formal. This bridal shop's website stretched the limits of 1990s web design as far as they could go. If you haven't heard of Yvette's Bridal Formal, this screenshot should suffice:

Yvette's website has long outlived the actual store, which permanently closed when a hurricane destroyed the building. But long after the splintered remains of the Florida strip mall that housed Yvette's were hauled to the city dump, enthusiasts and gawkers have kept the website preserved and alive.

Yvette's website is like electronic outsider art. At first, your eyes are overloaded by the jangly, crowded design. (For those who stayed awake in art history class, the phrase "horror vacui" comes to mind.) But after one goes through page after mesmerizing page, a certain internal logic becomes apparent. Yvette's website makes sense on its own terms. After a while, you almost appreciate the aesthetic consistency.

Apparently Yvette's website was the work of the owner's friend or relative (depending on who you ask). As the website got shared among people who had no interest in weddings or prom dresses, it became a bit of a liability for the people trying to actually run a business. Apparently whenever someone called the store to ask if they were really the people behind that wacky website, the clerk would hang up the phone with a cold "Thank you for calling Yvette's Bridal Formal."

Anyway, Yvette's has recipes on its webpage if you look past the alien art, personal manifestos, and conspiracy theories. Most of the recipes look ordinary, especially compared to the rest of the site. Perhaps that is why these brownies wedged themselves into my mind.

Further research indicates that this recipe comes directly from the Land O Lakes website, but that is neither here nor there.

We have previously encountered cheesecake encased in chocolate cake. Even when we got that misguided recipe to work, it wasn't as good as it sounded. But cheesecake and brownies seemed like a better match.

The recipe starts by melting your brownie ingredients in a saucepan. At first I wondered why anyone would do this on a stovetop instead of the microwave. Then I realized that by doing the brownies in a pot, we are saving the mixing bowl for the cheesecake. After all, most people don't have multiple mixers on the countertop. But because sometimes you get lucky at thrift shops, I do! And they came with microwave-safe bowls!

After finishing the brownie batter, it was time to make the cheesecake. Like most cheesecakes, it was a simple matter of siccing an electric mixer on the ingredients. We were soon ready to get this into a pan and bake it. The recipe notes that the top layer of brownie batter "will not entirely cover cream cheese mixture," but I didn't have that problem. Instead, the cheesecake didn't cover the batter in the first place.

Our second round of brownie batter was a bit tricky to coax into place, but it tasted too good to care.

The brownies leveled themselves off in the oven, so my ineptitude with a rubber spatula proved harmless. And the brownies had developed that perfect crisp, shiny, crackly top.

Upon cutting the brownies, we found that the cream cheese looked a little unnervingly aerated. It was almost leavened like bread. I worried that I had ruined a batch of brownies with an intrusion of Dormeyer cheesecake.

When we cut the brownies, my camera decided to actively sabotage me. Every picture I tried to take looked like this.

I haven't had such rotten luck since I tried to take pictures of the marzipan-stuffed brownies. But you can take my word that they were really good. Consider the bad pictures as proof of how good the recipe is. The brownies didn't last long enough for me to try again.

Even though there were already hints that I should make these again, I don't like a recipe that exists solely for a gimmick-- even if said gimmick is cheesecake. I wanted to know if the brownies were any good without the help. We all know that cream cheese icing can fix almost any failure, and these brownies have a baked-in injection of it. So I carefully cut out an edge piece (you will recall that the cream cheese didn't reach the edges), and... the brownies are really good. They're almost as good as the recipe we brought home from Canada. So, we at A Book of Cookrye recommend two things: making this recipe, and exploring the weirdness that is Yvette's Bridal Formal.

Fun with Fudge Frosting

 When last we saw the nun brownies, we had made the brownies themselves twice but never tried the fudge frosting that came with the recipe. We at A Book of Cookrye were nevertheless curious about whether this boiled concoction would be any good. Furthermore, we wondered if it would actually improve the brownies. I've found that brownies, being very rich and sweet already, usually don't need any post-oven improvement. But this brownie recipe came with an icing recipe, so in theory they would perfectly complement each other.

Fudge Frosting for Brownies 1 c sifted powdered sugar 1 tbsp cocoa powder 2 tbsp cream (or half-and-half) 1 tbsp butter Combine in a saucepan and cook until it boils around the side of the pan. Remove from heat and beat until it is thick enough to spread. It sets quickly when it's ready, so wait until you're ready to spread it on your brownies before making it. Covers one small batch. Dominican Sisters (Oxford, Michigan), Anniversary Slovak-American Cook Book, First Catholic Slovak Ladies' Union, 1952

I usually don't bother sifting powdered sugar that is going to be boiled because any lumps always disappear in the bubbling heat, but I didn't want to argue with a convent's worth of nuns. 

As an recipe note, we don't have cream in the house, and I wasn't about to get a carton just to use a single spoon of it. However, someone else in the house has taken to using half-and-half in coffee, which seemed close enough for today's endeavor.

I don't think those nuns were kidding when they said to boil it only until it bubbles up around the edge of the pot. The overcooked fudge icing turned a bit crumbly when we tried to get it onto the brownies. 

Also, this recipe makes exactly enough to cover this one small pan. It's like God meant for this icing to go with only this brownie recipe.

We all tried the frosting-crowned brownies and were delighted. It's basically a brownie with boiled fudge on top. As aforesaid, I usually don't think brownies need icing on top, but this really did improve on perfection.We all ate the entire pan with embarrassing speed.

I know that a lot of boiled icings exist in the homemade world, but I've never done one until now. I began to think about how we might vary and play with the recipe. My first thought was this: when you first take the icing off the stove it's still very runny, and you stir it hard to pass the time while it cools and thickens. We thought to ourselves, what if we poured it out as soon as we took it off the stove? Would we get a lovely thin layer of glaze that turned into a delicate shell of fudge?

For those of you cooking along with us at home, this is the cookie recipe from the back of the Reese's chips bag-- except this time we used white chocolate chips instead. As you can see, we did not get the thin glaze we hoped for when we dumped the still boiling-hot icing on top of them. The icing separated out and just wasn't as nice as it could have been if I'd waited until it had cooled (stirring the whole time of course). However, the icing did cool off enough to keep itself together by the time we got to the last cookies in the batch.

Both the cookies we iced in premature haste and the ones that we iced properly tasted just fine, even though the first ones didn't look right. But we started to wonder... if we separated the icing recipe from the brownies it came with, did we have a quick in-a-pinch recipe for fudge? We gave the icing yet another go (we've made it thrice so far,for those of you who are counting), with a new ingredient:

I thought we'd get delicious fudge-coconut clusters, but this really is a frosting recipe. They look cute, but they tasted like coconut and icing. The chocolate part did have a nice praline-ish texture, though. They weren't bad, but they weren't what I hoped for either.

We ate all of these, but they weren't worth making again. But chocolate and coconut swirled in my mind after my previous attempt to unite them until I had a vision. I imagined the brownies filled with a generous amount of coconut because I like coconut a lot. I even had the perfect recipe which I had saved from Mid-Century menu a long time ago and periodically made when I thought my then-significant other deserved it. (Seriously, it's really good.)

Source: Mid-Century Menu (read about her adventures making this recipe!)

This would be the perfect coconut filling for the brownie delight of my dreams- it tastes amazing, but it has never (no matter how many times I made it) set enough to serve as candy. This shortcoming never mattered since we always just ate it out of the pan with one spatula per person.

Here is a cross-section of what I imagined:

And here is what happened when the brownies fell apart when I attempted to stack them.

I should have known that such decadence would have been forbidden by nuns. But since I am not in a convent, I tried to cut the edges even (it didn't work) and make something semi-pretty. The icing certainly looked tempting as I poured it on. Take a good look at the photo below, because that's the last time this looks at all promising.

It's hard to pour out this icing without salivating.

And here we see the tragic results. There was an attempt.

You may be surprised about this, but it fell apart into a sad chocolate coconut mess when you tried to cut yourself a piece.

With that said, while my dream fell apart, all the components of my vision added up really well when you ate it--- except the icing that inspired the whole mess. It was too sweet on top of all the coconut and brownies. The coconut recipe uses unsweetened chocolate, and you should too. Sugary icing on top candy is a bit too much. I should not have defied God's yardstick-wielding enforcement squad by putting the fudge frosting on anything but otherwise-unadorned brownies.

However, the brownies and the coconut were absolutely perfect together. Also, putting the coconut candy on top of brownies solved the problem I always had that I could never serve it up. The coconut candy, no matter how many times I made it, always remained a sticky mess that clung to the spatula until you thwacked it onto your plate like a cafeteria lady slinging mashed potatoes. Treating it like a decadent brownie topping instead of a standalone delight seemed more right. But I definitely overdid it in making a not-majestic tower of chocolate. A single, non-stacked layer of brownies with the coconut on top would have all the deliciousness I envisioned without the structural instability.

In sum, this tower of cocoa and coconut was really good and also so rich that after a very small portion you were done eating it. Everyone will only want a little bit, so you can make dessert for like twenty soon-to-be-sated people without having to get out a second 9x13 pan. To give my attempted artistry some dignity, I want to show you that we did indeed have the layers we dreamed of in the part that remained on the platter after a few days of everyone hacking off a little bit when we needed just a chocolate lift.

Also, the icing is very good and worth making again. If you're making a small batch of brownies, definitely consider pouring it on top.