Team Late Night and the Raccoon's Stone

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Originally Posted by Lil4X

Mornin' team!

Plans to sleep in foiled by #1 daughter needing a ride to the bus stop. Mom just squinched her eyes shut and pretended to be asleep. I got the short straw.

From our test kitchen comes a cautionary tale about believing everything you see on TV. Healthy brownies, like most technical miracles like cold fusion and perpetual motion are just another fraud. It is more like alchemy, in which last night we discovered the means for turning chocolate into $*@#.

If you haven't seen the newest culinary trick for putting more fiber in your diet, you haven't missed anything. The idea is to reduce fats and add fiber to a package of brownie mix by substituting a can of pumpkin for the egg and cooking oil in the mix. My girls who are expert brownie-makers, saw this trick on some TV cooking show and wanted to try it. On TV the result looked nice, and the guests said it was delicious and they couldn't tell the difference between these brownies and the ones that used the conventional ingredients.

Boy were they wrong. The recipe produced a lumpy mess in the baking pan, requiring 15 additional minutes to bake (instead of the 5 minutes less time the proponents of this travesty would have you believe). The brownies were simultaneously gooey and crumbly, chewy enough to make you wonder just what was IN them. Then it struck you, "This thing tastes like a chocolate pumpkin!" Yes, it's that bad.

In an attempt to validate the test, we each ate one square. That is to say we choked down one square - the rest was relegated to the garbage can. If someone tries to tell you about substituting pumpkin into a brownie mix to produce a healthy dessert, smack them around for me. Then sell them a backyard fusion reactor.

I'm still tasting the things 12 hours later, and they are still awful.

This is definitely in the early running for post of the thread. Simply a great read!