I’ve bitched about this elsewhere, but I’m going to bitch about it here too, as it is infuriating and humiliating and unbelievably pathetic, all at the same time.

I’ve reached a new baking low. For valentine’s day, i wanted to do something special, so i went and specially searched out a box of brownie mix – no mean feat, let me tell you! Now I *could* have made a batch of brownies from scratch, and have done before, but in case you don’t remember my u.k. baking travails, let me recap briefly. Put me in a stateside kitchen, and I am, in all actuality, quite a decent baker. I used to get lots of joy from doing breads and cakes and cookies in the u.s. yet you would never know it by the quality of my efforts here across the pond.

This baking in the U.K. thing has become a personal albatross. My old recipes don’t work since they’re not metric (even with conversion), the ovens are too small, (so everything is either too close to the top or too close to the bottom, and burns), The water is rock hard, (I am convinced that that much calcium is bad for baking), and everything is just always *off*. Flour is different , baking powder is different, and I have turned out more inedible doorstops since moving here than i ever have before in my life, and that includes the innumberable blue play-dough “cakes” i fed my brother as a child .

Thus, the brownie box mix. So we had dinner, and I went to bake the brownies. And I went to follow the directions on the back. The ingredient measurements were in millilitres. And my measuring cup is in decilitres. (you see where this is going, don’t you?) those of you who know me know I’m not great with metric at the best of times. I was tired, and had had a few glasses of wine and I wasn’t thinking properly, and only realised once I had a big bowl of brownie soup, that I had well and truly fucked up. There was much sobbing and J had to calm me down as I poured my brownies down the sink. The cumulative weight of all my culinary disasters caught up to me, and I was inconsolable.

and that, my friends, is the sad tale of what will surely become known as the st. valentine’s day brownie massacre.

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