My Baking (Mis)Adventures 1: My First Time Making Brownies

The very first time I tried to make box brownies, I almost burned the house down (Yes, you read that right, I fucked up box brownies). This was in 11th grade, long before I got sick.

So, I make the mix and it looked absolutely amazing. Put it in the pan, still no problem. Put it in the oven and about 7 minutes later, my mom asked, “Does anyone else smell that?” I didn’t for another few seconds. “It smells like something is on fire.”

She got up and rushed to the oven and panicked. I got up and rushed even faster because I didn’t want anything to happen to my brownies. They were supposed to be amazing gooey deliciousness. If this was a kind world, nothing could happen to them.

It turns out this is not, in fact, a kind world. Because I am dyslexic, I had read broil as bake. In the cooking class I had taken several years before, they had only told us that there was a baking option. They had never mentioned a broil. I not only didn’t know what broiling meant, I didn’t even know that it even existed.

Broiling, for those who may not know, is basically grilling. In ovens, it usually means that the coils on top of the oven get really, really hot. Or if you have a gas stove, flames shoot out. Essentially, it’s the oven’s version of grilling.

Broiling is not apparently what you want to do with brownies. They were molten (meaning they were red and about to start on fire). My mom put on her oven mitts as fast as she could, ripped open the deck door and flung the brownies outside like a frisbee. And thus, my mom saved our house from burning down because I broiled the brownies. 13 years later, and we are still joking about me broiling the brownies.

And that was the start of my baking (mis)adventures. I’m going to try and become a better baker by trying. I will probably fail a lot. In fact, I’m almost guaranteed to fail a lot. So, bare with me (or is it bear with me) as I fuck up baking in every possible way.