Day 23: Further Adventures in Baking

Monday, June 4, 2012 

After planning it for weeks, today I finally got everything together that I needed to bake brownies. 

I did have to improvise some of the ingredients based on what is possible to find in Czech grocery stores. I used kakao powder instead of baker's chocolate, got butter in the single package it comes in here (fortunately, it's about the same size as two sticks in the US), and left out the vanilla extract entirely, since as far as I can tell, it does not exist in Prague. 

Fortunately, there was no one else using the Institute's Miniature Kitchen # 3 at the same time, or it might have been hard to find room for everything. 

I was trying to remember how to convert from degrees Fahrenheit to Celsius, so I'd have some idea what temperature to use in a European oven, when the IT expert at the Institute walked in and said he just bakes everything at 170. That seemed worth a try. 

It was a long and nervous half-hour wait before the brownies came out. I thought I'd burned them at first, but it turned out to just be the darker color of the chocolate. 

After another long wait for them to cool, I finally cut out a corner and tasted it... 

Perfection. 

It would have taken me weeks to eat a whole pan of brownies by myself. (Well, one week. Most of a week. Certainly a few days.) Instead, I left a note inviting other people to take one each. 

Four hours later, they were gone. I think that's a good sign.