Tweeners

What you see here is a platter of my Mommy Day project -- a flat out fun kind of thing. Waffle Iron Brownies is the official name but these are not quite brownies and they're not quite chocolate waffles. Closely related to both, by ingredient and form, these cousins of the clan have their own interesting personalities.

The batter is thicker than either waffle batter or regular brownie batter -- more like cookie dough. In fact, when it comes time to cook these little goodies, you grab a couple of teaspoons just as though you were making drop cookies. Plunk down a walnut-sized chunk of dough in the middle of each waffle iron section and drop the lid. Although the recipe says to spray the waffle iron first, I only did that the first time. There's enough butter in the dough that the little guys wouldn't dream of sticking, bless their little hearts.

Here's the recipe: melt 1/2 cup butter and place in bowl. Add 1/4 cup unsweetened baking cocoa powder, 3/4 cup granulated sugar, 1 tablespoon water and 2 eggs, beaten. Then mix in 1 1/4 cups flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt. (I had intended to substitute vanilla flavoring for the tablespoon of water but forgot.)

You can add chopped nuts if you want, or chocolate chips. Halfway through the batch, I chopped up some Ghirardelli bittersweet baking chocolate and mixed it in. Made for some righteous results, that's what.

The original recipe suggests dusting the finished product with powdered sugar. Personally, I loathe powdered sugar on anything. Incredibobbly messy, don'cha know. Had I been in the mood for any kind of coating, I'd have grabbed a small paper bag or a plastic freezer bag and tossed in a mixture of granulated sugar and cinnamon and I'd have shaken the freshly cooked morsels in that. I might have even added a pinch of cayenne to the shaker mix for that Aztec touch.

I didn't keep track but I think I ended up with two dozen or so of the beautiful beasties, 4 at a time. Not so many that I got impatient and started whupping up Texas-sized extravaganzas to get it over with. That would have made 'em look like waffles and, really, they are NOT waffles. And, in spite of the name, they are not brownies. A little bit of both, not quite either, something somewhere in between.

I hereby dub them Tweeners. Because I can.