Brownies

Last night's failed experiment with my host brother...

I am not a baker in America, and Kyrgyzstan is worse.  I thought I'd enlist my host brother to help me make brownies last night.  We used a recipe from the PC cookbook which called for a kilo (2.2 lbs) of sugar.  

We don't use our oven here, I'm not sure why.  The one time I asked my host mother she said that it was resting.  Actually though, I've never seen anyone use a built in over here.  They just have electric ones called duhovkas.  

My first mistake was putting it in too high causing the top to burn in just a couple minutes.  I scraped the burnt stuff off and tried again on a lower shelf and a lower temperature.  An hour later and it was burning again but it never did get fully cooked through.  I ate a huge bowl of burnt / raw brownie mush and felt a bit nauseous.

It was funny to see my neighbor and Kanat faced with this plate of super rich, chocolate mush.  My neighbor, trying to be nice, told me how good it was, as he moved it around on the plate with his spoon.  (On a side note, he also washed his plate afterwards, which he's never done before and I was really impressed as men here rarely do things like that.)

Kanat tried to spread the brownie goo on bread.  But a couple spoonfuls was enough.  I think brownies are going to be added to the list of weird American foods that they don't like (along with most of the things I've had them try: soy milk, curried lentils...)