What would you do?

If you were walking down a path in Golden Gate Park near the California Academy of Sciences and your child found a tattered recipe for brownies near a puddle on the ground, would you go home and try to make them? We did.

A few weeks ago we had just finished a trip through the Academy of Sciences and were walking behind the museum, near the kitchen and staff-only entrance, when my son yelled out that he found a "secret treasure map." I absentmindedly yelled "Cool!" and then went back to walking along with his sister. He ran up to me, breathless and holding the recipe out to my face and said "No, really! This is a serious map! Look! It has math on it!" I looked at it a little more closely and saw the word "BROWNIES" across the top of the page and I stopped dead in my tracks. Could this be the recipe that the Academy uses for the gourmet cafe that I always sit in and eat my packed-from-home lunch in? The very same one where I drool over the brownies every time I am in there, yet I am turned off by the $4 price tag? Did my son just find the San Francisco equivalent of the famous Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe? I'll never be sure, but I'll be damned if this recipe doesn't have the same kind of measurements that would serve a busy cafe in a museum like the Academy Cafe.

We came home and decided to give it a go, but I halved the recipe for obvious reasons, you know something is up when a recipe calls for a pound of butter and 14 eggs. And you know what? It was pretty darn good! I really appreciate some of the baking tips it gives - the hot water trick works like a charm. We'll never know if this was the big discovery or not, but it made for a fun afternoon with my son baking in the kitchen. And he thinks they are the best thing he's ever made and he is right... NEXT!