Pooks read my entry about the brownies I made and noticed that I added the following note about the caramel sauce I used:

I used a brand I found at Lunardi’s that was made with sugar and cream. Read the labels! No corn syrup, ever!

She asked me what I meant by that.

You know how you always hear that you need to learn to read labels and find the “sugar” words? You know, anything ending in -ose. The biggest one you need to look for is high fructose corn syrup. It’s in everything. It’s cheaper than sugar (which is kept artificially expensive to please a few well-connected families) and has led to the explosion of high-calorie, extremely sweet snacks we have. It’s in everything. It’s horribly sweet, much more so than sugar (I have convinced myself I can taste the difference).

One thing about HFCS, though: it doesn’t work the same as sugar. It actually leads to an increase in fat storage in the body. So if you’re eating the same calories of HFCS as you would with sugar, you end up fatter.

If you’re gonna eat sugar, eat sugar. The trick is to find products actually made with sugar. Even when shopping at Whole Foods—which I believe has a mandate not to stock products made with hydrogenated oils?—finding stuff made with sugar and not HFCS is a trick. At Whole Foods, the label often reads “organic corn syrup.” Pass on by.

Greg Critser wrote an excellent book named Fat Land. Do yourself a favor and read this book immediately. We all know Americans are fatter than ever, consuming ever-larger amounts of fat and sugar than we did 30 years ago. Critser investigates the question of why that is, and in doing so takes through the birth of the corn glut, the development of high fructose corn syrup, what is palm oil anyhow? and what exactly is behind the “supersizing” of American meals.

You don’t have to change your choices of what to eat, but you owe it to yourself to learn a lot more about what’s in there and why.

(Toni: read this after noon on Tuesday.)

I wanted to send Toni a little present to say, “Whoo hoo!” over her nice news of late. My first thought was to send a book from Amazon, possibly something about writing. What I wanted was, How To Enjoy Your Life As A Happy, Published Writer. But most of the titles I ran across were like

Being A Writer Sucks, Doesn’t It?

or

How To Get Your Horrible Manuscript Into Some Kind Of Shape (but don’t blame us if it can’t be saved, loser)

And I thought, This isn’t the sort of message Toni really needs right now.

Well, no books. And probably no novels, as she needs to buckle down and do some writin’. Okay, I could make her something. And she has noted all the baking I’ve been doing! I know, I’ll bake something and send it to her!

As usual when I think this sort of thing up, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I found the recipe I wanted to make and decided to make it Sunday afternoon, which meant I could freeze it Sunday night and then ship it off Monday morning. (Smarter would have been to make it on Saturday and freeze it two days, but sometimes my critical facilities aren’t all they could be.)

Of course, before I could get to Toni’s present, I had something I wanted for Mother’s Day: chocolate-chocolate-chip muffins, which required a trip by Sur La Table to buy the jumbo muffin silicone pans (which were cheaper than the nonstick pans, strangely). Simon woke me up at 6:30am and I immediately got cracking. For those of you keeping track, this means I messed up the kitchen once in the morning, cleaned it up, and then turned around and did it again.

The muffins were good, but not what I was expecting. For one thing, when I envision a chocolate-chocolate-chip muffin I’m thinking Devil’s Food. Extreme chocolate. The cake of these muffins was nothing special, I’m afraid. Not that this has stopped me from eating them, but I compare them to the chocolate-chocolate-chip muffins I used to get at Gelson’s on Tuesday mornings and they were lacking.

The time to make the brownies was right after lunch, so I can’t explain why I proceeded to read a novel (the very funny The Actor’s Guide to Murder by Rick Copp, one of the few novels I’ve read that definitely made me feel as though I were back in LA) and then go out for two hours by myself. I was supposed to be writing. The writing hasn’t been happening so much lately, so I didn’t get much of anything done. Darin took the kids to the Rosicrucian Museum, which evidently they both loved and were scared by, and then we all met up at the Sonoma Chicken Coop for dinner.

We came home to have Movie Night (we watched our old favorite, Totoro—here’s today’s scary gossip: evidently Disney has the rights to release a brand-spankin’-new version of Totoro, complete with all the bells and whistles, and they won’t because of the scene where the Dad is taking a bath with his girls…I. Hate. Disney.) and I got crankin’ on those brownies. (No crank was involved in the making of these brownies.)

When they were done and all cooled, of course I had to cut a small bit off as a taste test. I gave some to Darin and said, “I don’t actually have to send these to Toni, do I?” They were good. Very good. Of course, if I kept them in the house, I’d be likely to eat the whole damn pan myself, so I wrapped them up, put them in the freezer to get nice and cold, and then shipped them off this morning.

Of course, I’m worried about what condition they’ll be in by the time they get to Louisiana. For one thing: caramel. When the post office clerk asked me, “Are you shipping anything liquid or hazardous?” I felt like answering, “Not as of yet.”

I hope you enjoy them, Toni! And you don’t have to eat them all at once: they can be frozen! And you have large sons who I’m sure will be happy to take one or two off your hands. But you did say you needed chocolate for writing!

§

Gold Bar Brownies
From Pure Chocolate by Fran Bigelow

1 cup Caramel Sauce (page 177 or store-bought)
8 ounces (1 1/2 cups) whole almonds
12 ounces semisweet chocolate, finely chopped
4 ounces semisweet chocolate, cut into 1/4-inch blocks
1 1/2 ounces unsweetened chocolate, finely chopped
140 grams unsalted butter, room temperature (1 stick plus 2 tablespoons, or 10 tablespoons)
3/4 cup plus 2 tablespoons packed brown sugar
2/3 cup sugar
1 1/2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract
3/4 teaspoon instant espresso powder
3 large eggs
1 3/4 cups cake flour, sifted then measured

Position a rack in the middle of the oven and preheat the oven to 325F.

Lightly butter a 9-by-13 inch sheet pan or quarter-sheet pan.

Have ready the Caramel Sauce. It can be used cold, directly from the refrigerator. (I used a brand I found at Lunardi’s that was made with sugar and cream. Read the labels! No corn syrup, ever!)

Place the almonds on another baking sheet and toast in the oven for 10 minutes, or until their fragrance is released. Let cool, then roughly chop into 1/4-inch pieces. Set aside.

Melt the finely chopped chocolates (semisweet and unsweetened) in a double boiler over low heat. Remove when nearly melted and continue stirring until smooth.

In a mixer fitted with a paddle attachment, beat together the butter and two sugars until light and very fluffy, 3 to 5 minutes.

In a small bowl, stir together the vanilla and the espresso powder. Add to the butter mixture and beat to combine. Add the eggs, one at a time, beating well between additions and scraping the bowl several times. Pour in the melted chocolate and beat to combine.

Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the sifted flour by hand until no traces of white remain. Fold in the toasted almonds and the 4 ounces of semisweet chocolate chunks. The batter will be quite thick. Evenly spread the batter in the prepared pan.

Spoon the cold Caramel Sauce in tablespoon-size dollops over the top. Using a table knife drawn through the batter, swirl the caramel into the batter to marbelize. Bake for 45 minutes. When tested with a toothpick in the brownie portion (not the caramel), it will have moist crumbs.

Let cool in the pan 1 hour. Cut into squares and removed with a spatula. Store brownies in sealed plastic containers as long as a week, or freeze.

Ever gone somewhere and said, “Hey, I need some coffee. But I don’t want to patronize the Mermaid. Where, oh where, can I go?”

Well, if you have Internet access (and of course you do, having gotten a list of free Wi-Fi providers before starting off on your trip), you can check out The Delocator for your java fix. The Delocator’s mission:

Cafés are vital social outposts that have historically provided subjective, social, local, and at times, irrational interaction, inspiration, and nourishment to artists, hipsters, musicians, activists, intellectuals, radicals, and others alike. Currently, independently owned cafés around the world are under aggressive attack; and their numbers have been sharply decreasing for many years. delocator.net is a means to preserve these local businesses.

This is definitely not a perfect solution: I typed in my zip code and found the three local cafes I’d mention to visitors, but their list of nearby Starbucks is wrong, wrong, wrong. (Not that I’m going to go out of my way to correct it for them—best to find a local cafe.)

I also can’t figure out what their radius for cafe results is: I typed in my mom’s zip code (in San Francisco) and got pages and pages of cafes…not one of which is one of the cafes within three blocks of her house. She lives near California and Fillmore; there are quite a few there. When I visit Mom, I’m just not gonna stop by Mission Delores for a cuppa. However, if I applied what appears to be the radius in San Francisco to my own area, I should get a few more cafes in my results. There may be a few kinks in the machine yet.

But still! A good start! And you can submit entries for their list and make comments on cafes. Support your local coffeehouse!

(Via The Accidental Hedonist)