Makin' a mess

Ah. I love long, holiday weekends. Anytime away from work is good for me. Friday night I was to meet up with a friend and her husband and son. I never go anywhere empty-handed, so I made brownies and experimental muffins. The experimental muffins were the brainchild of my friend, Maggie. She gets complete credit for them (or else she might hurt me). It's a loaded muffin: bananas, strawberries, walnuts and chocolate chips. I believe she named them "Chocoberrynananut Muffins." I'm not for sure on that, though, so I will just call them "Loaded Muffins." The base recipe is from The Joy of Vegan Baking. It's the chocolate chip banana muffins. I reduced the sugar to half a cup, put in a half cup of chocolate chips, a half cup chopped strawberries and one cup chopped walnuts. I also used soy milk instead of water. There was a lot of batter for just 12 muffins, so I filled the cups completely full and they came out with big, domed tops. They were beautiful.

Juicy top-shot:

My kitchen lighting is terrible, my apologies. While I pulled these off with no trouble, I had no such luck with my brownies. I used my usual go to brownie from DEOTS, and doubled it for a 9"x13" pan. I melted one and a half cups of chocolate chips and half a cup of Earth Balance margarine, and proceeded to out it in the fridge to cool down. I made a half-ass attempt to clear some space for the bowl, put it on a shelf only for it to promptly fall right off and spill into the kitchen floor. I think I have mentioned I have 6 kittens in the house, yes? I have spilled chocolate and six kittens headed straight for it. I was tossing cats left and right just trying to get them out of the way long enough to clean up the mess, all the while putting sailors and pirates across the world to shame with the colorful variety of swear words spitting forth from my mouth. It was not pretty. It didn't help that my phone was ringing every two minutes either. I was out of chocolate chips at this point, so I chopped up a Ritter Sport Extra Fine Dark Chocolate bar and two Lindt 70% Cocoa bars, and tried one more time. I ever so carefully placed the chocolate in the fridge and continued on without any more trouble. They better have been some damn good brownies.

Such innocent looking brownies. Who would know they gave me hell?