Brownies this week

A great cook knows what ingredients she/he has on hand and makes sure to plan the cooking around it. She/he knows pretty much to the ounce how much flour, sugar, yeast and all that stuff is in the pantry.
A good cook knows what's in the pantry, He/she might not be able to tell you if it's a 14.5 ounce box of currants or a 15 ounce box, but he/she knows that the ingredients needed are at hand.
Than there's me. I thought I had plenty of granulated sugar. At least, it seemed I had a five pound bad tucked away somewhere. But, as it turns out I didn't. And I had already melted the butter and threw about a half a cup of semisweet chocolate chips in the melting butter as my experiment this week.
What to do, what to do? I went to my favorite cookbook "The Joy of Cooking". I knew that if anybody could save this recipe, it would be the Rombauers. And I was right. The advice was to substitute one cup of brown sugar for 1 cup of white sugar. I wasn't quite sure how it would work, but much to my surprise, it did work.
The brownies came out a nice cross between cakey and fudgey. I would say it was a success - at least to me. The food critic hasn't tried it yet;)
As to other baking, I have my fovorite yeast dough rolls rising so I can pop them in the oven. I also baked my honey a strawberry swirl cake, using the basic "Cheeto cake" method. I used a yellow cake mix instead of a strawberry one. I also took some frozen strawberries and cooked them down to a sort of strawberry paste. Part of this I used to flavor the buttercream frosting and part I used as the "icing" between the two layers of cake. He hasn't tried it yet, but he won't complain. He's afraid if he does, I'll never cook for him again.
My older son's birthday was yesterday and he requested his favorite, ice cream cake. Yes, the Carvel kind. Hey, that's what he wanted. I would have noticed the lack of sugar sooner if I had to bake a cake for him.
I was hoping to wait until next grocery shopping day to get more sugar, but I can't. My youngest sister's birthday is Tuesday and she will not settle for a Carvel ice cream cake - it has to be chocolate with chocolate frosting. And don't mess with any of the ingredients. I can't change the way the frosting is made and I can't change the cake recipe. She's very picky when it comes to that.
Anyway, that's it for me this week.
_enjoy_