It was, to say the least, ironic that the founder and moving force behind Chocolate Week (June 6th to June 10th) should be unable to find the recipe for British Brownies that he had boasted that he was going to make to start off the celebrations.
I searched every part of the house; I collated and put in date order all the copies of The Week that I could find; I have read through more Recipe of the Week articles than is good for my health – but recipe for British Brownies found I none.
It is my sneaking suspicion that the particular edition of the magazine that had the recipe I needed has been “tidied up” during one of the visits of The Family never to be seen again! I shall adopt that as an article of faith!
Not to be outdone by mere mischance I resorted to the Internet with renewed zeal and found the site for The Week, but to get into past issues of the magazine you have to be a subscriber and my subscriber number is known only to god and the good people at The Week. The web site promised that it would get my number to me “within 72 hours” but the problem was a little more pressing than that.
I searched through the Internet and I now have the general principles of Brownie Making firmly lodged in my mind; but the specific recipe for which I had already bought the ingredients eluded my search.
I eventually compromised on an amalgam of two (British) recipes and decided, given the ingredients that I had, what could go wrong?
Well, nothing worked out exactly as it said it would in the recipe, but as each of the fifteen remaining Brownies (I had to eat one for research purposes) is now resplendent topped with a thin square of chocolate on which is perched a chocolate sweet (stuck in position with honey) I think they look more than respectable. And they taste OK as well!
The real trouble starts tomorrow when staff other than the members of the English Department (who have a Brownie by right) engage in unseemly squabbles to get the remaining goodies!
My greatest fear is to forget to take them to school tomorrow morning. It is one of my early starts and I am mostly on automatic pilot at that ungodly hour and anything out of the ordinary takes second place to my zombie-like approach to the mechanics of getting to work!
As I went into Barcelona by train (leaving the car at Castelldefels station) I was able to call into one of my favourite cheap shops in the station concourse in Sants. Many of my Catalan art books have been bought at bargain price there. This time there was little to catch my interest in on the art front, but I did come across a cache of CD in damaged cases which were priced at €1! I took a chance of most of the discs being undamaged and bought 21 of them. I didn’t even look at who or what was playing them as I use things like this to while away the time I spend on the motorway going to school.
I have tested a few of them at home and put the rest in a CD holder to be placed in the car. The titles of some of them give a clue to their potential audience: “Best of Baroque” “Three Viennese Classic Images” “A Selection of Opera Highlights” “Classical Romance” “Russian Romantic Fantasy”. But, to be fair even the most luridly titled seems to have a good selection of music. For example at the moment I am listening to Tchaikovsky’s Quartet No 1 in D major played by the New Philharmonic Quartet led by Alexander Shustin (who?) and I have to admit that the Tbilisi Symphony Orchestra (a name to conjure with!) figures quite extensively in this collection! We shall see – and hear!
After a rain soaked night the weather has cleared up and the sun is tempting me to the Third Floor to recharge the batteries after the exhaustion which comes with culinary creation!
No such luck! The weather, though fine, is not that fine that I would want to lay out in it. Instead I have attacked the neighbour’s flowering tree-weed lopping the branches that were foolish enough to be beguiled by the artificial grass on our side of the fence.
I am now covered in greenfly, but the garden appears to have grown in size immediately. I have hidden away the branches of my crime and placed them in the communal bin where the evidence will be taken away at 6.30 am tomorrow. The weed-tree itself is looking a little shaken – as well it might be, two large plastic sacks of compressed vegetation having been hacked away from it. I do hope that I have not given encouragement to erstwhile shaded limbs to start branching out into the unaccustomed sunshine and actually accelerate the growth.
Never mind, I am shortly to be in receipt of a potent weed-killer for those hardy plants which survive even under the light denying layer of artificial grass. This weed-killer is systemic so any leaf is a potential way to root death for the bloody things pushing aside the “lawn” and for anything else organic that dares show its green surface in our bit!
An early start tomorrow and all my efforts must be directed towards preserving the British Brownies intact until the first break when the Department can sample them. The sharks will obviously be circling and it will take all my wiles to keep them off until The Sharing.
The good thing about being the first to make the offering in Chocolate Week is that I can then relax and wait for the others to respond to the height of the bar. I think the final touch for me will be a light sprinkling of icing sugar and then I am good to go!
And wait to see what the others are going to produce!
If my calculations are correct whoever is on Friday will have to produce something spectacular to keep up the effort and they will be nervous wrecks by the time Thursday comes along!
This has been a weekend when most of my reading has been devoted to the translation of captions on paintings and a half-hearted attempt to pick my way through the academic justification for the exhibitions that I saw.
I have to admit that when I was searching through my old copies of The Week to try and find the elusive recipe I was seduced into reading various articles that caught my eye!
Now I must gird my intellectual loins for the deathly season of examinations, marking and meetings which will greet us during the next week casting its pall of misery over teachers and pupils alike desperate to escape from the drudgery of a year which has been far, far too long.
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