Lacking baker's chocolate, I instead used cocoa powder. Three level tablespoons of cocoa powder and a tablespoon of some kind of oil (shortening, wtf-ever) is equivalent to a square of baker's chocolate, according to the box, so off I went.
...but that's a lot of tablespoons, when the recipe, doubled, calls for four squares of chocolate.
I have two versions: one for chocolate and one for cocoa. The latter one says "three to six" tablespoons of cocoa to make an 8x8 pan of brownies, but it also says "(or two squares of baker's chocolate)". I always double it and make an 8x13 pan.
Unsure what to do, I went into my box of kitchen stuff downstairs and found the version that had been stuck on my refrigerator in Cedar Rapids. It said "four squares of baker's chocolate"; that's equivalent to twelve tablespoons of cocoa powder, which is 3/4 cup of cocoa powder. I put in ten, and thought, "WTF, that's got to be enough."
Well...it is, and it isn't.
They're certainly chocolate brownies; there's no mistake about that. But they're not quite chocolatey enough. And being made with cocoa powder instead of real chocolate, they're not quite rich enough, either. I think the next time I make brownies this way, I'm going to keep it to 10 Tbsp of cocoa powder but I'm going to add milk chocolate chips before I pour it into the baking pan.
All else being equal, I should have just gone to the store and bought some damn baker's chocolate, though. Well, I'll remember that for next time. The important thing is, I've got brownies, and they're good even if they're not as good as usual.
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Gratz to Marko, who's been a naturalized US citizen for seven years.
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We're in a recovery, and the housing market is booming to Y2K levels!
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Also at Ace of Spades, Obama's high speed rail plan is stupid, expensive, and useless!
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WTF is this? Farm scenes are now "intellectual property"? Taking a photo of the sun setting over a haystack is a copyright infringement?
Huh?
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Boortz has an anecdote about how unions work.
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Some moronic iman is saying that Obama had better embrace islam, or else. Not a word about Obama being taught islam when he lived in Indonesia; if true that would make him apostate, and he faces death should he ever be subject to Sharia.
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When all the ISPs in the universe stopped including UseNet access with Internet access, I had to get a third party UseNet provider. I ended up getting a free account with TeraNews, since I don't download much from the UseNet anyway. (Some anime soundtracks, doujins, etc.)
Well, I used my account a couple times last week, for the first time since--jeeze, God knows when--because I was bored and hadn't looked at any of my usual groups for a while. I downloaded some stuff but it turned out to be crap, so I deleted it. I ran into my bandwidth limit, so I shut down the client and played some WoW.
Anyway, so last night I got an e-mail from them saying my bandwidth had been exceeded. Problem: I didn't use it last night.
One of two things happened: either someone has been using my account, somehow; or else that e-mail was ricocheting around the Internet for a couple of days.
Weird.
I suppose someone could have gotten my account info from a keylogger, though my anti-virus is up to date and my system is reportedly clean. Well, if I keep getting "out of bandwidth" messages, I'll go change the password, I guess.
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It's a nice warm day today. When I finally dragged my dumb ass out of bed, I saw that Scooter (the outdoor cat) was lounging in one of the patio chairs, in the sun. He gave me a look as if saying, "Okay, so where the hell's breakfast?"
After feeding the cats, I moved the vehicles down the driveway, so the remaining ice would be exposed to sunlight and, hopefully, melt. Normally I don't mind it being winter until springtime, but this year I find myself really wanting winter to be over now.
More and more I've been thinking about how nice it would be to have a dog. I can't get a dog right now, for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that I don't know where I'll be living. If I knew I'd be able to buy a house once the bunker is sold, I'd go ahead and get a dog; but I might have to rent an apartment--and most apartments don't allow dogs. (Some only reluctantly allow cats, for crying out loud.)
Breed? Shar-pei. A friend had one; they're nice, friendly dogs. They're short haired, so shedding isn't a serious problem, they're easy to keep clean, and they don't need brushing all the damn time. They're not huge, but they're not tiny yappy little shit dogs (pomeranians, shi-tzus, etc) so if someone breaks into the house, he's not going to be able just to punt the mutt out of his way. Shar-peis were, in fact, originally bred to be fighting dogs; but they have a good temperament, unlike other kinds.
Once I've got a house, I'm getting one, because I like dogs as much as I like cats.
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A couple days ago Sailor V and I started some new toons. His is a paladin named Rotran; mine's a mage named (of course) Ormüs.
I saw that he'd bumped Rotran to lvl 12, so I bumped Ormus to 16th. Heh. I also ran Vicki through Deadmines and farmed a bunch of cloth for Ormus, as this iteration of Ormus has skinning and tailoring as his professions. I was able to power-level Ormus' tailoring past 100 that way, and I'm going to do it again when this post is finished.
At some point I have to go shopping, as I'm out of a few things. But it's not critical, and it can wait until evening, I think. Heh.