Normally I find that baking banishes the blues, but yesterday it just wasn't doing it for me and I ended up feeling quite depressed by the end. I was trying out a new brownie recipe from the
Lorraine Pascale cookbook that a friend gave me a couple of months ago and things didn't get off to a great start. Or actually it did get off to a grate start as I managed to grate my thumb whilst trying to grate chocolate - fortunately no skin got mixed in with the chocolate but lots of blood started pouring out of my thumb so I had to dash upstairs to find a plaster. Bleeding stemmed I decided to chop the chocolate instead, an acceptable alternative according to the recipe. Mini-disaster no.2 was when I realised that I didn't have the right type of sugar - I had practically every other possible type of sugar in the cupboards but no light brown soft sugar... Typical! I compromised on a mix of light brown muscavado and soft dark brown sugar. Finally I got the brownies in the oven but I may not have had the oven at the right temperature initially as they took about 15 minutes longer than stated in the book to cook and even then the final product was possibly a little gooey even for brownies. Not to mention the fact that they didn't look much like the picture - it appears I may not have pushed the cookies you had to spread on top and push into the mix, in quite far enough.
Whilst the brownies were baking I thought I'd also whip up a quick batch of cupcakes as I wasn't sure whether our friend who was coming round for tea liked chocolate or not. It wasn't my best idea, possibly because I was rushing and overfilled the cases but the cupcakes didn't rise properly and just splatted out over the sides of the cases. They were rescued by slicing the tops off and making them into butterfly cakes!
So after all that effort I was left slight downhearted by my less than perfect results. Fortunately though looks aren't everything and my tasting panel (Mr W and our friend) were happy with the results, which finally banished my blues!
