I haven’t posted here in awhile so I figured it was about time to get started again :)

This is a broiled boneless & skinless chicken breast with cayenne and fresh cracked black pepper sprinkled on it. It’s served with grilled zucchini and red bell peppers, plus wild brown rice.

My all time favorite cookbook is “The Better Homes and Gardens New Cookbook“. My version is at least 10 years old or more, and it’s literally falling apart at the seams.

When it started falling apart several years ago, I took some of my favorite recipes from it and tucked them into the favorite recipes book my mom made for me many years ago. This way I should hopefully be able to hang onto those that I love to cook again and again.

And this is one of my all-time favorite, tucked away safe recipes: Fudge Brownies.

My 16 year old daughter made this batch a couple of days ago. She always seems to make them more “cake like” than I prefer, but they ended up looking wonderful for photos. I just sprinkled a bit of powdered sugar on top to dress them up a little. :)

In my outdated book, this original recipe is on page 107:

1/2 cups margarine or butter
2 squares (2 ounces) unsweetened chocolate
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
3/4 cups all-purpose flour
1/2 cup chopped nuts
1/2 recipe No-Cook Fudge Frosting OR 1/2 recipe Chocolate glaze (recipes pg 89)
Additional chopped nuts, optional

Now, my modified version doesn’t include nuts - either inside or on top - because I prefer brownies without nuts in them. I rarely make the icing or glaze for these either, mainly because I’m lazy :)

I use real butter instead of margarine, and more often than not I use unsweetened cocoa mixed with melted butter in place of chocolate squares. There are instructions on the cocoa can about how much to mix to create the equivalent of chocolate squares. It doesn’t seem to make a difference in taste that I can remember, I just usually have cocoa on hand more often than I do squares.

First, I create the chocolate squares equivalent in a small saucepan, then add the 1/2 cup butter from the brownie recipe too. Then I mix that together with the remaining ingredients.

When making brownies it’s important to not over mix the batter. You don’t want a smooth cake-like batter, instead you simply mix just enough for everything to be combined.

If you’ve just made a single batch, spread the batter into an 8×8 inch square baking pan. If you’d doubled the batch like I normally do, you can put it into a 9×12 or 13 sized cake pan instead.

Cook the brownies in a pre-heated oven at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes. I usually pull them out just before they’re fully “done”, because they’ll continue cooking for several minutes outside the oven, and this can make them turn out a bit dry. Let them cool for awhile, then put icing or glaze on them, or just cut them up and eat! :)

So I spent most of my day today looking through other people’s food photography blogs. And I realized I really need to start shooting on a more frequent - or at least regular - basis.

Now to be completely honest, I’m not entirely sure I’ll be able to actually do entirely new food shoots every single day. Or even every weekday. So to get things started I plan to first post new photos here each day. So, on the days which I don’t actually take any new pictures, I plan to troll through previous shoots that may still have photos left to edit and prep.

Today was an actual shoot day though, and I ended up with three different food items: Muffins, Brownies, and Sugar Melon (a.k.a. Cantaloupe)

I ended up finishing my editing fairly late today though, and now Grey’s Anatomy is on TV so I don’t plan to post all the photos just yet. Instead, I’ll leave you with the muffin shots first, and load the others here in the morning :)