The Day After Snow Day

All good things must come to an end. I guess this is how we differentiate the good times from the bad, and the other side of a snow day is the one that follows it. It's still not easy to get around, but you don't really have a choice. For 24 hours you were granted a pass from everything, and it didn't really seem right to spend your new, brief freedom working. You played in the snow and watched season 3 of The Wire and sat in front of this for 10 hours:

And when it was time to go to bed, you knew that in the morning you would be left with nothing but the faint suggestion of freedom wafting from your memory like a trail of smoke in the wind.

It is just this side of ridiculous that we should call off a day on account of 3 inches of snow, but that's how we do. It was an odd day where we weren't expecting any deliveries, and though we knew we'd disappoint the people that stuck it out downtown (sorry, all 6 of you), nobody wanted to tough out a day of no business and a miserable journey home. In the future, when there are two businesses to worry about, I don't think this will be an easy decision. We have to get chains for the Volvo. Wait, we need a delivery van. We need chains for the delivery van. I'll do that this summer, when chains are on sale. In the meantime, I'm still not into driving, especially on the roads around our house, which means I can get to H&H on the bus but I can't bus-it from the commercial kitchen to work with boxes of muffins and pie and sticky buns, so the baking is halted. And now the Acorn opening is pushed back until Wednesday the 24th. Which is just about killing Jeff. I am kind of basking in the last rays of sunlight, only having one business to worry about for the next few moments.

In other news, I want to tell you about a happy little accident, which has resulted in Peanut Butter Pie. Last week, I made a sheet pan of brownies. Now, my success rate with my brownie recipe is not even close to 75%. It's always something--if the oven isn't weird (because every oven is different, and you always have to adjust your recipe to a new oven), then I forget to sift the flour, or I use the wrong kind of flour because I'm out of the right kind, or I forget the vanilla, or the salt. But when the forces align correctly, my brownies are transcendent: very dense, very chocolatey. They give a really good chocolate rush when I make them correctly, which is rarely. So, the other day I made a batch for the first time in over a year. And they looked great. And I let them cool, and cut them up, and tried a 'broken' piece, and they tasted like crap. Had I lost my touch? I went over the recipe in my head. I used the right amounts of chocolate (bitter and unsweetened), I definitely used butter, I could even remember adding the salt and vanilla. And the cocoa...NO!. I had forgotten the cocoa. They tasted ok, you know, for a school bake sale or something, but not Half & Half caliber. But there I was, stuck with a sheet pan of expensive, unsell-able brownies. My options were to 1) take them home, stick them in the freezer, and eat a brownie whenever I can't think of anything better to do 2)throw them away or 3) turn them into something else. I had experimented with a Peanut Butter Pie a few months ago for a friend's birthday. It was a no-baker, classic graham cracker crust, cream cheese, cool-whip recipe which I modified only a bit, and I liked the results. So, without any recipe at all, I turned my sub-par brownies into a chocolate-crumb crust into which I baked a peanut-butter cheesecake, and topped it with whipped cream, ganache and toasted, salted peanuts. I wanted to evoke the Reses Peanut Butter Cup experience. I think it's a nice tribute to the marriage of peanut butter and chocolate, with the right balance of salt and sweet. And I can't seem to make enough of it, so I think it's popular. I'll be making it for as long as it takes me to get rid of these brownies, and probably into the future.