Yesterday I made brownies from scratch using a recipe from Americas Test Kitchen and you know what? The brownies were unbelievably awesomely spectacular, despite a few problems.

Cake flour is like normal flour but much finer. However most flour is packaged in those weird containers that leak a little from one seam or another. The cake flour I bought came in a box that once opened was like cereal packages, all nice in plastic. Except when I opened the plastic it sort of exploded. Cake flour everywhere but enough remained for the job at hand.

The recipe called for 6 ounces of chopped unsweetened chocolate. I had the chocolate but it was in these thick chunks. I tried using a knife but that didn't work. The chopping was taking too long so I decided that squooshing was a close relative of chopping. I put the chunks into double-ziplocked bags and went to the garage. There I gently dropped my 10-pound sledge hammer on them. It worked. The chunks fractured into smaller pieces. The bags broke too but I'm fairly sure I didn't get too much garage sweepings in with the chocolate.

I mixed the chocolate squoosh with unsalted butter (real butter mind you) over a double boiler, pampering the meltdown process so the chocolate didn't burn. Then I removed the melted mess and whisked in eggs and vanilla. Finally I folded in the dry ingredients. Not too bad at this point despite the fact that the batter wasn't mixed as thoroughly as I thought. The batter got really sticky as I poured the last of the cake flour in. I folded and folded and folded until everything looked smooth but when I started to pour it in to the pan, little white streaks appeared. Aaaargh!

But it cooked up well and the result was a chewy - and not burnt - chocolate delight.

Now to clean the cake flour still stuck to the ceiling...