coffee adventures

I've been drinking excellent Boca Java coffee all week -- I think I'll probably review one a week since I'm the only one here who drinks coffee, therefore when I grind it takes me a while to use it up. Since I had some ground Pajama Passion left I decided to try the espresso brownie recipe included in the Java News.

It's an odd recipe, I'll say that right off the bat. A pound of brown sugar? Are you sure? I crossed my fingers and forged ahead...until I got to preparing the pan. 8x11?? I don't believe I've ever seen a pan that size. Let's see...I have 7x10, 7x11, 8x8, 9x13...I elected to go with 7x11. Big mistake.

Halfway through the baking time, the telltale smell of Burning Goo On The Floor Of My Oven sent me running for my smoke detector to rip out the battery before it went off and woke up the sleeping baby. Uh oh. Major brownie catastrophe -- it was oooozing over the edges of the pan and all over the oven. Something tells me an extra inch of pan width wouldn't have prevented this...

So quick, I slid the pan onto a cookie sheet, put it on the top of the stove, yanked out the oven racks and scraped up the smoking hunks of brownie goo from the bottom of the oven. Put everything back in. Deep breath. A few minutes later, I smell it again. This time it not only oozed over the edge of the pan, but it also oozed over the edge of the cookie sheet. No way in hell was this recipe meant for anything but a 9 x 13 pan.



After all was said and done, though, good brownies. My husband's take: "They'd be even better if they didn't taste like coffee."