There’s no one foody thing that I always prepare for the holidays, but they really do provide a convenient excuse to try out recipes that I can’t otherwise quite justify making.

Like these chocolate mint brownies, which require $9 worth of York Peppermint Patties.  I know that’s not much in, say, Halloween candy terms, but I feel like it’s a big investment for an untested recipe that multiple reviewers say has an inexplicable tendency to become hopelessly burned.

Happily for my risk-averse self, they were easy to make and turned out just fine.  Deliciously fine, in fact.

(Recipe notes: given all of the reports of burning and warnings not to overcook, I set my oven 10 degrees cooler than called for, tented them with foil halfway through, and took them out precisely when the oven timer sounded.  And, after chilling in the fridge for most of the day, they were really perfectly done.)

The thing about this recipe, though, is that it makes for an incredibly heavy, dense batch of brownies.  So much so that we ended up chopping them into 1×1″ squares and storing them in gallon bags in the freezer.  (That’s a bread plate pictured above, not a dinner plate.  And gallon-sized bags, plural.)  And, as a result, they are currently challenging the Jejune household record for longest-lasting dessert — not because we don’t eat them, but because the quantity produced is just so ridiculous.

So, like it or not, I’ve got dessert covered until sometime around the New Year.  And honestly, I’m not quite sure how I feel about that, except to wish that this kind of work-to-tasty-result ratio were easier to duplicate for normal entrées: 20 minutes prep time!  Two bowls to wash!  Two weeks’ worth of dinner!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 21st, 2011 at 2:56 pm and is filed under bits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.