Brownies and Birthday Cakes

Long time no post. Sorry! In case anyone worried, the lack of post does NOT mean I have gone on a crazy crash-diet where I don't eat anything. As if. Rather, I have just been very, very, very busy. Insanely busy. You have no idea. I don't think I've gotten more than 3 hours of sleep a night since September. And that's on a good day.

This is a baking post! As some of you may know, my microwave-cooking adventures have had ups and downs. The score stood at 1:1--one success (banana bread) and one failure (cheesecake). I decided it was time to improve my numbers, so last Sunday when I decided to give my RA a gift for helping with us deal with certain problems Mi, E, and I have come to face living in the dormitory, I settled on brownies. Alright, I cheated and used brownie mix from a box, but the fact that I made these in a microwave, I felt, still deserves a post to commemorate it.

Microwaved in a glass Pyrex pan for 4 minutes, they came out chewy and delicious. E and I ate about half of them before I conserved the remainder for our RA.

October19th was E's birthday. I had been planning her strawberry cake for a month, and a week before I went to Surprise! Surprise! (which I report being one of my best shopping experiences ever. This is a home goods store. Yes.) and bought a small souffle dish to use as a cake pan in the microwave.

Considering my track record with frosting it didn't turn out too badly....

More later.