Today was an exciting, overspent day at the Hobby Lobby and the local kitchen supply store. I replaced the piping tip and coupler the dogs destroyed and got some new tips I didn't have. 

And! A disher! One of my lifelong dreams has finally come true. Yeah, my dreams are small.
Plus I got some other little fun surprises and stuff that I should be showing off soon. I've got Halloween orders to fill!

Starting Off With a Bang - Bite-Sized Hi-Hat Brownies

This one didn't survive very long after the picture was taken.
(Omnomnom)

One of the benefits to being well-known as a baker to your acquaintances courtesy of making about a trillion birthday cakes at one point or another would be that no one questions you when you decide to start selling stuff. In fact, they usually start with "How much for [blank]?"

And so it came to pass that I picked out a bakery name on Thursday afternoon, got my first order that night, got a job on Saturday while baking said order and made my first delivery on Sunday. And even though the chocolate was a little melted due to a prolonged stop at the local Waffle House (where I received more orders and requests for business cards from the staff) the customer was delighted by the brownies and the free gift I sent along, Caramelized Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies. The latter were devoured during the subsequent conversation before I even left, while the brownies went in the fridge to harden up again.

When I received the order, I hadn't made anything like it before. But I had heard of hi-hat cupcakes and was eager to attempt it. Step one would be the brownies.

Now, I love brownies. They have to be one of my favorite things to eat and make, and I've made a lot of different types. But I didn't have one go-to recipe or anything I really thought had come out well enough to make the cut. So standing in the kitchen Saturday morning, I pulled out Old Faithful. When my mother was 9 years old, her sister gave her a copy of Joy of Cooking, and if you want the traditional, rich, really really bad for you stuff, there's no better source. I was surprised and a little bit worried to see there was only one brownie recipe in the whole 700 page book, but, boy-howdy, it was enough.

The first step of the recipe was to melt a stick of butter with four ounces of bakers chocolate. Right then, I knew me and this recipe were gonna get along just fine. I *cough* accidentally got a little bit of the batter on my fingers and had to lick it off. The next second found me shouting to my mother to get in the kitchen and taste this batter. It baked up beautifully and I easily got my dozen pretty ones out of the four pans with a few left to snack on in the house. This is my new favorite brownie recipe. I'll have to cart the behemoth of a recipe book up to my room one of these days and publish it here.

I wasn't quite so lucky with the buttercream. I made Alton Brown's recipe and instead of putting it in the fridge to cool off extra when it was soup, I kept beating it until the butter separated. Ooh, it was ugly. So I made the recipe off the side of the powdered sugar box. It wasn't that great, but it was passable. And I did like the vanilla flavor more than the straight butter of Mr. Brown's version.

Then I iced maybe eighteen of the brownies and stuck a dozen of them in the fridge and left the rest on the counter and walked out of the kitchen.

Oops.

We have nine dogs in our house. And not little ones, either. My mom runs Tallahassee Collie Rescue and one of our foster dogs (okay, more than one, but this time we caught the culprit) is a bit of a counter cruiser.

The face of a brownie thief.

So, I lost some of the experimental brownies, but that was my own fault and he didn't get enough chocolate to hurt him. So I piped some icing on a few more, and stuck them in the freezer with the others like I should have in the first place anyway. After they were nice and frozen, dipping them in chocolate was the easy part. Though I did get a little chocolate on my fingers. Such a hard life I lead.