Brownies, Skulls, and Other Awesomeness

Happy Tuesday everyone! Anyone else have the extreme blahs that come from not-quite-halfway through the week? Or possibly from the dreaded inorganic biochemistry, my arch nemesis of the semester? Well fortunately I do have a cure, or at the very least a treatment. A passion of mine, shared by many, is cooking and baking. Which unfortunately, dorm life is not very amenable to, since we are required to buy the meal plan at the college cafeteria, the Food Zoo.

But wait! (Says the cheesy infomercial.) For Christmas, my mother gave me the inspired gift of a mini slow cooker, one of the few things I can have in the dorms since nothing with an open flame or heating element is allowed. Actually I may be pushing the rules a little even with my crock, but if you don't say anything I won't. I've used it to make my morning oatmeal, cream of wheat, poached eggs (disaster), hard-boiled eggs (success!) and now, brownies! Nothing better than ending your kinda crappy night with a few spoonfuls of chocolatey goodness with a friend by your side.

My slow cooker and ingredients, assembled here in my "kitchen"

 Not to pitch for Silex Proctor or anything, but $14.99 for something this awesome, I mean really? How can you pass that up? Ahem. Anyway.

Recipe? I'd love to say it was entirely homemade but dorm cooking does have its limitations, so my cooking partner and I used a package mix which only called for the addition of oil and water. Lacking oil, we used applesauce as a substitute. Wanting extra chocolateyness, we also added some chocolate pudding. I will add that all our ingredients were also gluten, egg, and milk-free due to my partner's requirements, in case you were wondering if that's doable, which it surprisingly is!

After mixing all that up, really just eyeballing the amounts since we were making 1/12th of the full brownie mix package, I placed the mixture in a Pyrex custard-size bowl in a water bath in the cooker, cranked the heat up to high and let her go. Biggest problem with slow cooking is that I can't lift the lid to peek in on how it's doing, as I normally obsessively do. I left it on high for 2 full hours before we couldn't resist any longer and pulled it out to eat it. It was good--definitely chocolatey--but we added far too much pudding, so it was more of a pudding than anything. There's always a next time, though! That's what I love about cooking-always room for do-overs.

Difficult to take a good picture of, but here's the finished product

So if this isn't inspiration that you can cook just about anything anywhere, I don't know what is! Now wait, you say-where does the skull part come in?

The skull part comes in where I tell you that I get to do morphology on skulls in the lab tomorrow! But-gasp! What kind of skulls? I'll come back for an update tomorrow and see how it goes. Until then, happy cooking, and. . . skull-morphing. Or whatever.
                          :)