Adventures in Baking

Baking is difficult when you have no measuring utensils. Or a recipe to follow. For the last two Sundays we have made brownies to sell at Claremont Methodist Church to help fund the trip to Mozambique. The first week we followed the recipe that was given to us but did it without measuring cups and spoons, and they turned out just fine using our eyeballing technique. The second week was a bit more challenging. We lost the recipe. No, someone at the centre stole the recipe. So we attempted to make brownies from memory. One cup sugar. One cup oil. Was it one or two cups water? And how much cocoa do we need? Over a cup? Ok. When we pulled them out of the oven, they looked like flat, black bricks, and they were not burnt. Ingredients… yes, we for sure got them all. Amounts? Still a little sketch. We were fine with our black brownies until we had something to compare them to at church the next day; a batch made by a Mozambique veteran who used the recipe and all the proper amounts; two cups of flour, not three and eight tablespoons of cocoa, not one-and-a-half cups. The real ones were about twice and tall as ours and about 10 shades lighter. Nonetheless we laughed it off, deemed them edible and sold them for R5 each to unsuspecting customers. We promised an extra cocoa flavor, made with love.