Brownies!

 

I've always been more of a cookie person, but a good brownie brings a different sort of joy.  Part of what makes that for me is an intense chocolatiness, an unapologetic singlemindedness that elevates it beyond simplicity and into sharp focus. There are several ways to bring that notion to fruition, but getting the best result is rather more difficult, and I often combine several flavor force multipliers to get what I want.

A trick I like is using things that don't readily go stale. On top of how flavors change with moisture levels, it's a question of time.  Bit of a bother to bake a batch of brownies and then have a day or two to eat them all before they brick up and get thrown away. (I like being the same size and shape I've been in since high school, thank you.) 

One of my favorite niche (well, niche when I started using it) recipe concepts that does this is Claire Ptak's, from her Violet Bakery (now Violet Cakes in London). In addition to using almost no liquid beyond egg, it uses rye flour instead of wheat, which gives a subtle but robust depth of flavor while removing the majority of gluten (rye has about half as much by weight as wheat does, if memory serves) and resulting in a fudgier finished product.

Another one that's been more popular in recent years has been the use of glutinous rice flour. No, there's no gluten in it, that's just the name. Used primarily for making things like mochi in the past, it's had a moment or two in desserts of varying varieties. The briefly popular and timelessly delicious Hawaiian Butter Mochi is probably the best known among them, but if you add some cocoa powder and chocolate, that's a damn fine baseline for a brownie too.

So that's what I'm here to give you. Chocolate Mochi Brownies. Cut them small, because they're deep, dark, and rich. You want about five incredible bites with a nice cup of something hot, or maybe a glass of milk.

Equipment:

Kitchen Scale, Large Bowl, Immersion Blender/Food Processor, Sifter/Fine Strainer, Silicone Spatula, Medium Pot (~3qt), Measuring Spoons, Parchment Paper, 9x13 Baking Pan (or an 8x8 for a half batch)

Ingredients:

1# / 454g Glutinous Rice Flour
80g Cocoa Powder (sift this into the flour, it's extremely prone to clumping)
1 Tbsp Baking Powder
1 tsp Salt

150g Butter, melted (plus more for the pan)
800ml Whole Milk
500g Dark Chocolate couverture (at least 50%), chopped finely
300g Granulated Sugar
2 Tbsp Instant Coffee Granules
100ml Kahlua
4 Large Eggs, room temp, beaten
4 tsp Vanilla Extract

Instructions:

- Preheat the oven to 350F/170C.
- Butter your pan of choice, then additionally butter a piece of parchment paper and line the baking pan with it. (If using an 8x8 for a half batch, I recommend a springform.)
- In the Medium Pot, warm the milk and butter on low heat till the butter is melted.
- Dissolve the Sugar and Instant Coffee in it, stirring gently on very low heat.
- Melt in the chopped Dark Chocolate.
- Once the chocolate is mostly melted, remove from heat and stir till fully melted.
- Add the Kahlua.
- In the Large Bowl, weigh out the Glutinous Rice Flour, Cocoa Powder, Baking Powder, and Salt.
- Add the Eggs and the Vanilla to the milk mixture.
- Combine all ingredients together in the Large Bowl.
- Blend/process for 20-30 seconds till fully incorporated and smooth. It will be an extremely loose liquid. Do not worry, that's what it's supposed to be like.
- Pour into parchment-lined pan and bake at 350F/170C for 32-38 minutes.
- After removing from the oven, allow to rest for 5 minutes in the pan before removing to cool more thoroughly.

The coffee flavor of the Kahlua is meant to bolster the chocolate's intensity, but if you want to tinker, swapping in Disaronno (for almond) or Chambord (for raspberry) both work quite nicely. All three of those liqueurs are quite sweet, and the alcohol bakes off with no fuss. In fact, it results in a slightly better rise because alcohol evaporates faster than water, so you get a two stage lift. (This is also why people use vodka in pie dough, for the record)

Another good thing about this is that you only really need an immersion blender or food processor to make this- you can just dump all this together, blend it smooth, then pour it in a pan and bake it off. I strongly recommend using Superfine Sugar instead of regular Granulated if you decide to do it that way though, it's prone to developing a somewhat gritty feel if you don't.

Despite having a surprising amount of water-based liquids in this recipe, these have kept just fine in my fridge for a week and a day so far. I also topped them with a fairly basic cream cheese frosting to compensate for the one odd bit- the top of these can get a thin layer of dryness, so I recommend things like ganache, a thick buttercream or other frosting.

It's not about growth, but refinement.

 

"It takes all kinds to make this world", or so the saying goes.

...Yes. But that doesn't mean what most would think it means. The charitable reading is "Everyone has something to contribute". The codicil that's often ignored is "...but most of those things are cautionary tales."

Society requires all its participants to have a given development floor, and the greatest barrier to a successful one is the failure to define and uphold the requirements for it. Finding and removing the extraneous and hazardous through research and experimentation is a task of near-endless repetition and research. Once the provably unnecessary or unacceptable is isolated and expunged, the accompanying data and evidence, the how and the why, are best archived in clear, open reference as examples of what is Wrong and how Not To Do It. 

Just because they do exist doesn't mean they should. Mistakes worth dying over need to result in death. Clean the mess, mourn the dead if you must, but identify those errors and make sure no one makes them again.

That's what the legacy of the inadequate is supposed to be. Not coexistence, not comfort, and absolutely not continuation.

Friends

 The various marginalized communities have had to find all sorts of different ways to communicate under the radar in order to protect themselves.

Over the last century, many of us have gone from:

"Friend of Dorothy"

to 

"Friend of Frank-N-Furter"

to

"Friend of Garak"

and even

"Friend of Bluey".

What does that say about how the community chooses to face the world?

Taxes

I don't mind them at all. In a civilized society, they're not a problem. They are, in brief, the price the individual pays for being part of that collective, for maintaining the framework and structure of that civilized society. It makes your schools, hospitals, roads, railways, bridges, ports, wilds*, and plenty more besides.

No small number of Americans just... don't really get that. They think all the money just goes into other people's pockets. (To be fair, they're not completely wrong. There is a degree of waste in U.S. governmental spending, but it's never in the places most people bitch about.) Another problem comes with the taxation system as it exists. It's needlessly complex by design, creating a problem specifically to more readily sell you, the citizen, a solution: Pay Someone Else To Do It. (Apropos of nothing, fuck you Intuit.) Wouldn't be inherently bad except for the all-encompassing flimflammy ethos of American "self-reliance". Those concepts are at cross purposes, leading the LCDs to get confused. And when people are confused, the easy solution is simply Pay Someone Else To Sort This Out- and there goes some of the hard-earned money. 

Instead of a system designed to be simple, efficient, and effective, it's deliberately difficult. It results in a fully fabricated field of finance, largely loopholed into irrelevance by those with wealth, widening the gap between the Haves and the Have-Nots. The richer you are, the easier it is to avoid having to pay a valid and acceptable share of taxes. On top of that, many administrations' worth of government have actively hamstrung things like the IRS specifically to make that problem the norm- largely due to the ease of fostering influence between money and power.

Get the thousand wealthiest American citizens to pay a fair share of the tax burden, and cut the tax code down to size. That's a solid place to start.

*Yes, even the wilds- Humanity has cemented itself as the most intrusive and harmful impact since... Chicxulub, give or take. Got to do something about that.

A question worth asking

But a question I don't necessarily want to ask:

"Did you give them the new position as a trap, so they'd screw it up badly enough to get fired?

If yes, then why?

...and if no, then why not?"

"What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas"

 

It's hard to explain the importance of something like this without sounding extremely suspect. But that's all right, even when I shouldn't be I'm used to being something of an outlier in my outlook. So.

There are concepts that intermittently wander in and out of the collective psyche of the general populace. As abstract concepts, they're not inherently bad. As active methodology? They're terrible.

Keep that firmly in mind when I say "enthusiastic consent" is arguably the biggest red flag possible in terms of any sort of potential intimacy.

Consent is rather like a Lovecraftian eldritch horror.
-The more active attention you give it, the more dangerous it gets.
-In any given place, the more you think it needs mentioning, the less likely you belong there.

Comfort is founded on approval. "Yes" is not something to be granted- it's the default. "No" as a concept is something more dangerous, which means it's obliged to have requirements. Those requirements vary widely in scope, scale, and urgency based on circumstance, but the possibility of going from "Yes" to "No" requires the approval of all involved. 

Currently, there is a widely held erroneous belief that it's the other way around.

Building an environment where everyone understands the ebb and flow of the people and things in it? Where understanding and trust are the order of the day, but also that accepts duty, obligation, the possibility of conflict, and of allowing resolution within it? Not terribly difficult- if the components have also been built correctly. So of course, the real problem is flawed foundations. 

Build your microcosm, your networks, and your happiness. Your education, expertise, ethics, and empathy.
But don't neglect to build your armor, sword, and shield.

Work? Nah.

 

I don't really like my primary job. It forces me to do things I really should never be doing, and doing them on behalf of people that mostly should never have existed in the first place.

To be fair though, I've only ever held one job I enjoyed enough to justify staying even if something more lucrative or stable came along- and then the plague killed it.

Plus, it's not like I've ever worked for an operation or company where I wasn't qualified to run the whole thing- and I've worked for some Very Big Companies in varying capacities. Hand off a c-suite to yours truly and long lasting success is almost inevitable with how easy it would be, so long as the underlying purpose is valid. Not that there are many valid businesses out in the world these days. All but a precious few are designed specifically to fabricate a need rather than fill one, and then sell a service that undoes the harm the company itself provided. It's recursive, wasteful, and full of fakery.