The great Venezuelan brownie challenge

No, no! you twisted mind guys!!!! I am not talking about Cilia Flores or William Lara sucking up to El Comandante!!!! I am talking about this:


Normally I do not go for those premixed bakery items but the other day in Caracas I found this brownie mix and I could not resit to give it a try. Quite a feat for me since I have given up baking long ago, preferring to challenge my health and diet with expensive pastry offerings, the only way to limit my intake of heavenly foods.

There were two things that made me decide to bake for the first time in at least two years: the brownie mix is made with Barlovento cocoa, one of the best in the world, and the flour is actually plantain flour. So I bought the bag to take it with me to San Felipe.

Unfortunately I had not paid close attention to the recipe in the bag. It required two eggs, margarine and walnuts.

It took me a week to find the eggs. They have been sitting in my fridge for a week. I only found margarine this morning. And I never found the walnuts. So I had to set for peeled almonds which I had to roast before. I did not tried substituting margarine with butter (which we can strangely find, Venezuelan been a margarine country, where they even call margarine butter though never buying the real thing!!!). I know from my experiences from a younger age when I could bake something weekly without much worry, that in baking you cannot just substitute things at random. If cooking is an art, baking is a science and the first time one follows a baking recipe, even from a box, one must follow EXACTLY the instructions. I hope the almonds for walnuts exchange will not be too traumatic for the end result....

The baking is in the oven. For the result? You will have to wait later in the day, for tea time. Tea of course brought from my trips abroad since there is only one place in Caracas where you can buy anything else besides the disgusting Lipton yellow bags, or if you are lucky, some Twinnings. But the great Venezuelan tea challenge is quite another story...


-The end-