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“You know, with this much butter, this recipe would be prime for making pot brownies,” Riley said, shrugging suggestively over the ripped shred of cardboard she was reading from as she leaned casually against the kitchen counter.
“Yeah, no, this recipe’s actually pretty ideal for that,” Will said, digging through the cabinets just below her as he tried to piece together the right equipment in the condo where they’d been for the last day or two. He’d already been through the cabinets a few times in the puttering he’d hummed through to keep himself occupied the last few days, especially while Riley slept.
”Just because you use it as a THC delivery system doesn’t mean it shouldn’t also be a good brownie,” he said, the thick, glass bowl clanging dully on the drab formica as he pushed himself back up, his atrophied muscles still protesting even such a simple movement. “Amateurs using boxed brownie mix don’t know what they’re missing.”
“What, are you saying you’ve done rigorous testing on the subject” Riley asked as she looked over at him with a look of charmed confusion.
“Um,” Will scratched his head awkwardly as Riley giggled dreamily. “Well, actually, yeah? Kinda?”
“I just wouldn’t have had you placed for,” Riley began.
“A pothead?” Will supplied flatly.
“Well,” Riley said.
“What, because I was a cop?” Will asked.
“I don’t know,” Riley said, smile creeping out broadly, with what looked like slight sheepishness, but Will thought he might be imagining that. “Maybe?”
“I wasn’t always a cop,” he said, gesturing with the spatula he’d just retrieved. “I used to just be a cop’s kid.”
“I guess I don’t know what that means,” said Riley, lining ingredients up on the counter.
“Combination of trying to prove you’re not a goody goody and thinking you can get away with whatever?” Will shrugged. “Listen, there’s a reason I know something about picking locks.”
“Yes, well, I don’t know,” said Riley as she hiccuped out a giggle, “maybe I spoke too soon when I said I wouldn’t have talked to you before all this.”
“Oh yeah?” Will said, a playful smile blossoming on his face.
“This doesn’t erase all those stories about head injuries from drunk bicycling on stairs,” she said.
“That happened once!” he protested, trying not to laugh too hard. “Also, I don’t know that I said I was drunk. I think I said I was fucked up at the time. Could have been something else.”
“I’m not going to argue,” Riley said. “I just don’t think I would have talked to you, in the unlikely event we crossed paths.”
“I,” Will began, attempting to protest, but giving up, his shoulders relaxing down as he unwrapped squares of chocolate into the bowl. “I don’t know that I would hang out with him now, either. I’ll be honest. You know, even if that made sense in any way. But he did make a mean brownie.”
“Did you learn this recipe just for making pot brownies?” Riley asked.
“What?” Will looked up at her, confused, “Oh, no. I started making these before I even knew such a thing existed. There’s no microwave here, right?” he asked, looking around the room.
“No,” said Riley, beeping the oven to life. “It’s not necessary, is it?”
“Nah, just makes it easier,” he shrugged, snapping the butter paper to drop a whole stick into the bowl. “These brownies, though- they actually kind of figured in me putting that part of myself aside though.”
“How so?” Riley asked, pushing herself up to sit on the counter beside where he was working.
“There was this one point I made up this huge batch of, uh, enhanced brownies with my roommate at the time,” he said, setting the bowl over a pot of water on the stove. “The kind where you really only need one to get a pretty significant high going.”
Riley grinned somewhat lopsidedly in agreement.
“So, yeah, we made a whole bunch, and then we individually wrapped all of them and stuck them in the freezer. ”
“How very industrious of you,” Riley said, grabbing the empty butter paper and rubbing it around the inside of the baking pan.
“Heh, yeah, it was quite the assembly line. We thought we were so fucking smart right then. Anyway, it hit this point where I’d just want a brownie. Like, just a brownie and it would be like, ‘guess you have to get high, then, unless you want to make more.’ And it got to a place where it almost felt like a chore.”
Riley pressed her lips together, looking away as she set the pan down on the counter. Will would pay to know what she was thinking right now, but he wasn’t sure he could ask. The drug that severed his cluster connections seemed to have no negative effects so far except, perhaps, its stated purpose. He would almost guess that she was visiting someone else, except that she was taking the same drug for the time being. The distance in her gaze was almost palpable, though.
The butter began to pool around the smooth, dark peaks of the chocolate in the bowl. Will busied himself in stirring, steadying the bowl with his hand through a folded towel. The condo complex, located near a ski area, was more or less dead this time of year, compounding the silence of the place.
He reached over with the hand that had been steadying the bowl, the towel warm from the heat of the stove, and touched her leg, sitting along the counter. As she turned towards him, he would swear the color in her face warmed, though it could have just been the golden-toned light radiating up at her from the stove’s hood.
“It’s beautiful,” she said, looking at the way the molten chocolate swirled, thick and smooth, around the rubber scraper in the bowl. “Maybe we should just eat this.”
“It’s not sweet yet,” he reminded her as she slid off of the counter and stood close next to him, looking down into the pot. He lifted the bowl from the steaming pot and set it on the unused burner next to it, tapping the scraper on the side of the bowl and offering it to her. “I mean, it’s actually still pretty good, but it’s not sweet. Like, at all.”
She swiped a tentative fingerful, sticking the whole finger in her mouth. Her eyes closed as she considered the flavor. Will dabbed his finger to the scraper and then to his tongue, the familiar bitterness, salty from the butter, hitting him first, but blooming into a more complex flavor as it sat in his mouth. He remembered being initially shocked how much he’d liked the flavor of the unsweetened chocolate at first. It had been long before he’d ever heard anyone yammer on about the percentage of their chocolate. He hadn’t really considered how much the flavor relied on things other than sweetness to make its case.
“That’s,” she began and as her face lit in surprise, he could see her searching for the right word.
“It’s surprising, isn’t it?” he jumped in.
“Yeah,” she said, reaching for the scraper again, taking another fingerful. He smiled warmly back at her. He was glad to see her coming to life like this, though he supposed he was the one who had more work to do in that respect right now. But, then, if he remembered his fairytales right, Sleeping Beauty’s prince had had a pretty rough go of things, too. Arguably, the prince had drawn a rougher hand in that story. The last few days had been a bit like getting together with a friend you haven’t seen in years, hoping you still have some sense of who the other is in a different context, hoping you still like each other without whatever trappings you began.
Will had seen Karim, the roommate who had assembly-lined pot brownies with him when they’d lived together, at the end of last year, near the holidays, for the first time in like five years. They’d met for drinks and exchanged pleasantries, but the whole thing had been awkward. Karim was doing well for himself in work, was married with a kid. Neither of them could seem to dredge up anything to talk about that did more than graze the very surface of things. There was nothing ill he could say of him, but there wasn’t much of anything he could say other than, “He seems to be doing well.”
It could also be like uncovering treasure left buried across the time apart, though. The time with Riley - just with Riley - over the last few days had given them the room to appreciate the subtleties of each other in a way that hadn’t been possible for the length of their acquaintance. The word ‘acquaintance’ felt like it didn’t belong anywhere near them. It was odd to be reminded how much territory remained to be charted between them.
“We’re the only ones eating these, yes?” Riley asked.
“I don’t know who else would at this point.”
“Good,” Riley said and grabbed the scraper out of his hand, licking it. He wrapped his arms around her as he tried to wrestle the scraper away from her.
“Come on, I promise it’s worth waiting for the actual brownies,” he said as he felt the vibration of her laugh against him, still trying to hold the scraper away from him. She dipped it in the bowl of chocolate again, turning around to paint the tip of his nose with it. As he stopped reaching for the scraper, she relaxed against him. Her breathing deepened, her back resting against his chest.
Did the time she had spent watching him asleep count in a different way than the time he had been asleep in her presence? It was easy - almost too easy - to forget how much he hadn’t gotten to tell her about yet. He felt like the headlines of his pothead years, the years he’d spent trying to shed the skin of the past, were written in broad, bold strokes on himself, but apparently they weren’t bright enough to be obvious. There were so many things that had required next to no explanation initially that the process of explaining himself, particularly now, felt almost inevitably awkward.
But this; this didn’t require explanation. He breathed in, nose buried in her hair before he remembered that she had dabbed it with chocolate. He pulled back from her and wiped his nose with his hand, laughing under his breath.
“I think I just got chocolate in your hair,” he said. Her hand touched the back of her head as she turned towards him, grinning, his arms still around her. The tip of her nose pressed gently against his and she leaned up to press a light, cocoa-scented kiss to his lips.
The beep of the oven, letting them know it had preheated, startled him more than he wanted to admit, reminding him how far his mind had wandered. He turned back to the stove and reached for the sugar.
“Was this recipe something your mother taught you?” she asked as he carefully watched the sugar pile up in the measuring cup.
“Eh, no. She wasn’t much for cooking. Not in my lifetime, at least,” he said, pouring the sugar in. “She worked a lot and,” he paused, realizing he wasn’t quite ready to unseal that line of thought right now. “She worked a lot. If you want to know how I learned to make brownies, the answer to your question is on that piece of cardboard right there on the counter.”
Riley picked up the scrap of cardboard again, reading over the words printed on the inside.
“It’s just the recipe on the inside of the box,” he said. “I found it totally by chance when I was, I don’t know, like twelve.”
“That seems kind of random,” she said. “Were you just ripping up boxes?”
“Yeah, kinda?” Will said. “My dad and I had been at each other again - I don’t even remember about what - and I think he just wanted me out of his hair, so he sends me out to the garage to break down boxes, maybe blow off some steam. Here, if you really want the right point to question if you want to make brownies or just get out a spoon, this is the time to do it.” He pushed the bowl in her direction and she swiped a fingerful right into her mouth.
“Hmm,” she said, “I don’t know, might be too sweet now.”
“Fair enough,” he said, watching her wipe up a little more onto her finger nonetheless.
“I thought it was too sweet.”
“Too sweet to eat all of it like this,” she said, taking a little more. “Finish your story.”
“You set?” he asked, holding an egg up against the edge of the bowl. She shrugged agreement.
“So I’m ripping apart boxes and this tiny little box turns out to have words on the inside.” He started cracking eggs into the bowl. “Which, like, it feels like I found a secret message or something. I think I was expecting something more like out of James Bond or some shit, but it was a brownie recipe.”
“Are you sure there wasn’t a secret message embedded in the recipe?” Riley laughed. He’d barely looked at it, giving it something of a cursory once over at the beginning, since it had been a while since he’d made it. But it turned out this recipe was burned into his brain so deeply that he hadn’t needed to. But the ripping open the box had almost become part of the ritual of making these brownies.
“I guess I hadn’t considered that,” he said, cracking the last of the eggs.
“Let’s see,” she said, holding up the cardboard more intently. “There’s not a lot to go on in here. It could only be a very short message.”
“‘Please send brownies’,” Will said as he poked at the yolks before beginning to stir the whole thing together, enjoying the way her laughter grew in response. “What? That’s a short message.”
“So, did you go tell your dad you wanted to make brownies?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “My dad’s not much of the cooking type, either. He doesn’t really cook anything that doesn’t amount to meat on bread. I think part of why I actually wanted to try out the recipe is that I knew it would confuse him or annoy him or something. I just started making it on my own.”
“How else are you going to figure out if there’s a secret message,” said Riley, her finger playing with the rough edge of the cardboard.
“How do you mean?” he asked.
“Well, if it’s a shite recipe, it has to be there for some other reason,” she laughed.
“What if they’re just so clever they can hide a message in a perfectly good recipe?”
He drizzled the batter in thick ribbons over the bowl, watching them melt back into each other as they settled. Riley’s face had grown distant again, but her lips had fallen into a soft smile. His eyes set softly on her until she felt it and her eyes snapped into focus on him.
“I was just trying to imagine you high,” she grinned and Will blushed and shrugged where he stood. Maybe he shouldn’t have brought that up, but it had seemed stranger to him that she couldn’t just tell these stories of his for herself.
“After all that time you watched me drugged out to the ends of the earth?” he said.
“That’s a different issue. That was anaesthesia - that was about erasing you, not,” her smile pressed together thoughtfully as her eyes drifted towards the ceiling, “not about coloring in your edges.”
“I don’t know,” he said, “It may not have knocked me unconscious, but I can’t say it was never something of an anaesthetic. But I think we all find our own weird ways of trying to disappear. What’s that saying you’re fond of about what makes an addict?” his eyes drifted towards hers.
She shrugged noncommittally, dodging his gaze.
“But I’m so done with that part of my life,” Will said as began to scrape the brownie batter into the pan, not entirely sure what he was trying to communicate by stating that so emphatically. “Especially right now.”
“Fair enough, I suppose,” she shrugged. “You’ve barely even slept the last few days.”
“I’ve slept enough for quite a while,” he said, spreading the batter out in the pan. He grinned at her as he picked up the pan to put it in the oven. “Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll get over it eventually.”
“I would hope so,” she said, claiming the bowl and the scraper.
“For now, I’ve got catching up to do,” he said and felt a tiny shock course warmly through his body as their eyes touched, their bodies starting to fall into alignment where they stood. He knew there would be time to tell the many more stories left to reveal, but right now, there was time for just a little sweetness in the middle of all this and no need to rush.
One Bowl Brownies
This is actually the recipe off of the inside of the Baker’s Unsweetened Chocolate Box, but it is a good one, regardless of whose chocolate you use. It makes a very dense, rich brownie that is more like a slab-o-chocolate than something fluffy and cakey. You'll have to supply your own fluff.
Ingredients:
- 4 oz. (115 g) unsweetened chocolate
- ¾ c. (170 g) salted butter (1½ sticks) (or unsalted butter plus ¼ tsp. table salt or ½ tsp. kosher salt)
- 2 c. (550g) sugar
- 3 eggs
- 1 tsp. (5 mL) vanilla
- 1 c. (125 g) flour
Preheat oven to 350°F/180°C
Melt chocolate and butter together using microwave or double boiler.
Microwave: cook on high for 2 minutes, then stir until the chocolate and butter melt together into smooth amazingness (the hot butter is going to do some of the work of melting the chocolate here - keep stirring!)
Stovetop: Melt chocolate and butter together in the top of double boiler (or bowl on top of saucepan) on high heat. When the butter is mostly melted, stir frequently until butter and chocolate are smoothly incorporated. Remove from heat.
Stir in the sugar, then eggs and vanilla. When this is well incorporated, add the flour and stir just until combined.
Spread into a greased 13x9” pan and bake for 35 minutes. Don’t overbake these, or you’ll dry them out. They’re pretty dense, so overbaking risks turning them into little chocolate bricks.