Brownie Bites

Today san­ity and I took a lit­tle break from each other and I invited two other kids — two adorable sis­ters who live close by — over for a play date. To bake. With my two kids. Because that’s a peace­ful way to pass a Sun­day after­noon. It’s 8:15 pm and I’m still dig­ging sprin­kles out of the liv­ing room car­pet — how did the sprin­kles get into the liv­ing room?! – and find­ing icing splat­tered in unreach­able cor­ners of the kitchen. Actu­ally the kids were very well behaved, and even though if you ask four young kids to take turns doing any­thing and even if you tell them what the order will be, they will all ask, “Can it be my turn next?” every five sec­onds, there was no fight­ing, no melt­downs.  And the cup­cakes we made turned out amaz­ingly deli­cious. Best of all was that when the girls went home at the end of the after­noon they took six cup­cakes with them!

This is my prob­lem with bak­ing — I love to do it and I love to have a lit­tle bit of what­ever has been made but I don’t want or need a big pile of treati­ness call­ing me from the counter. And call­ing the kids who then cir­cle the treats like wild dogs.  The other way around my love/hate rela­tion­ship with sweets is to make them mini. Maybe it’s just a mind game but I feel bet­ter hav­ing just a lit­tle bite or pack­ing a cou­ple of lit­tle things in a lunch. Like these Brownie Bites Esme and I had made recently. It’s an excel­lent Martha Stew­art recipe. They’re about the size of a sil­ver dol­lar but are so chocolate-y good you don’t feel deprived that it’s not the size of a nor­mal brownie. If you eat them while they’re warm from the oven, the chunks of choco­late will be all melt-y good. And of course when we made them on set a cou­ple of weeks ago I was sure to wrap up a dozen for our lovely pho­tog­ra­pher Maya to take home. 

pho­tos by Maya Vis­nyei