Coca-Cola Brownies

It's been a while since I baked anything. I miss throwing flour all over the kitchen and vanilla extract aroma and licking the batter — oh, how awesome were the days you could gorge yourself on unbaked cake?! You can't do that anymore cause batter has raw eggs in it, and raw eggs can have salmonella in them, and why is our chicken population so sickly lately? Screw SARS and avian flu, I want to lick the mixer blades! I made hash-free Coca-Cola brownies, which isn't as weird as it sounds at first, and they came out good, if more than a little globby.

Here's the recipe.

1. Put two cups sugar and two cups flour into a bowl. Mix with spoon.

2. Put one cup unsalted butter or margarine (that's one stick), one cup Coca-Cola, and three tablespoons cocoa in a pot. Pot on stove, stove on high, boil the mixture.

3. Clean up mess from exploding cola pot.

4. Pour boiling soda/cocoa/butter mixture over sugar/flour mixture.

5. Put two eggs, one half-cup of buttermilk, one tablespoon vanilla, one teaspoon baking soda, and one and a half cups of those little marshmallow things into the sugar/flour/soda/etc. bowl. Mix with mixing utensil. The end product, which you can't freaking eat, isn't watery or anything, but it's thinner than most batter.

6. Line a 9" x 13" baking pan with aluminum foil (makes cleaning up easier), smear Crisco all over the aluminum foil, and drop a thin layer of flour on the Crisco. This is the step I always forget, and then I have to resort to some ridiculous improvised MacGyver contraption to separate brownies and foil without the former crumbling away.

7. Pour batter into baking pan. Put baking pan in oven. Half an hour, 350°. Don't burn yourself.

8. Make frosting. The timing here is tough because you want the frosting and brownies to both be warm when you marry them. Say five minutes. Take that pot, which hopefully didn't explode back when you were boiling Coke earlier, and put another stick of margarine, three tablespoons of cocoa, and six tablespoons of Coke in. Boil it up again, taking to heart any lessons you might have learned the first time you did this.

9. Dump a box of confectioner's sugar into a bowl. I mean, take the plastic bag out of the box, take the sugar out of the bag, and put that in a bowl — but you knew that, right? Right?

10. Pour boiling margarine/cocoa/Coke mixture over sugar. Stir. Stir! Stir!!!!

11. Brownies are done when you can stick a toothpick in them and the toothpick comes out dry

12. Remove baking pan from oven, aluminum foil from baking pan, big layer of brownie cake from aluminum foil. Smear frosting on. Let cool. Refrigerator helps.

The brownies turn out pretty gooey, and I sort of wound up with a giant brownie blob you have to eat with a spoon in my refrigerator. They're a little less chocolaty and a little more sugar cookie-y than the standard brownie, but not nearly as sweet as I was afraid they'd be, considering how Coca-Cola brownies are basically sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and more sugar. They're a nice change from my usual coffee-flavored brownies, although I'm not thrilled about taking a Coke-plus-Mentos sort of risk every time I make them. There are easier ways to make a mess in my kitchen.