Moving day

The twins have purchased the perfect house, and are moving! Update on perfect house to follow, as soon as they are actually there. For now, the formerly perfect apartment is being disassembled. If you look at the picture, you can see that this is a pretty much a perfect moving job. My moves have always involved huge disgusting messes, but theirs seems ultimately organized and totally free of those gigantic dust mice (rats, or even muskrats in my case) who usually creep out during these events. The moving men estimated that they would have seventy boxes of books, and they made a pretty good guess. They had sixty-six boxes – nearly all books.

On the day of the trip to the pasta machine store (see previous post), Rebecca encouraged me to get this BBC cake magazine. Given that I love cakes, and that everything on the BBC recipe website is totally yummy and usually easy to make, I was easily persuaded. Then when I asked her for suggestions as to what to make for book packing treats, she said I should look in my new magazine. After eliminating everything that would take more than twenty minutes to assemble or that would require a trip to the store, I settled on these brownies. Historically, I love brownies, but I love them best if they are made by someone else. Mine usually just don’t seem to turn out. These, however, fulfilled all my brownie expectations. I was suspicious about the cooking time given, and when I checked the brownies after 30 minutes, I was not surprised to see that they were still mooshy in the middle. Then I realized I had initially made a calculation error on centigrade to Fahrenheit conversion. I fixed that and cooked them a while longer and then Yum!




BBC Banana Nut Brownies

175 g (6 oz) butter
300 g (10 oz) brown sugar
175 g (6 oz) plain chocolate broken into pieces
100 g chopped walnuts toasted
3 eggs, beaten
2 bananas mashed (mine were small so I used three)
100 g (4 oz) self-raising flour
2 tbs cocoa
1 tsp baking powder

Heat the oven to 180C (356 F – really). Grease a 9x11 inch pan, and line it with parchment paper.

Melt the butter and chocolate in the microwave (or in a pan on the stove), stir in the sugar and cook it till it is all smooth. Let it cool a bit.

Sift together the flour, cocoa, and baking powder.

Stir in the nuts, bananas and eggs until well mixed, and then pour it into the prepared pan. Bake it for 30 minutes, or until it's firm in the center. Cool for a bit and then cut it into squares – about 20.

The nutritional information was given, but I think you would rather not know about it if you want to really enjoy these.