The Best Thing You'll put in Your Mouth All Week, I Promise You

This recipe comes from the book, “The Sweet Potato Queens’ Book of Love”. My former co-worker Mary gave me this to read and I copied some recipes from it. Not sure how long I’ve had it but Mary and I worked together from 2001-2003 so it has been a while. The recipe is in the chapter “What to Eat when Tragedy Strikes” and is good for what ails you. The beauty of it, too, is you’ll probably have all of the ingredients on hand and can whip it up whenever you need a dose of chocolate.  Here is the recipe as written in the book:

Chocolate Stuff

Beat two eggs with a cup of sugar and ½ cup of flour.  Add ¼ teaspoon of salt. In the microwave melt together one stick of real butter (I never use unsalted; I think it tastes flat) and 2 fairly heaping teaspoons of Hershey’s cocoa. Get regular Hershey’s in the dark brown box – anything else is different and will screw it up. Dump the butter-cocoa mixture into the other things, and stir it up good. Then add a running-over teaspoon of vanilla. I use the real vanilla, but the grocery store kind won’t ruin it. Stir that up, too. If you decided to go for nuts, use a whole bunch of pecans, chopped up fine.

Pour the Stuff into a greased loaf pan, set the loaf pan in a pan of water, and stick the whole business in the oven set at about 300 degrees. Depending on how your oven cooks, it needs to stay in there for 40 to 50 minutes. You can reach in there and tap on the top of it at 40 minutes. If it seems crunchy, I’d take it out. You can’t really undercook it, since it’s good raw, but you don’t want to overcook it and lose the gooey bottom so crucial to the whole texture experience.

Trust me. This will be the best thing that has happened to you in a very long time, possibly ever. From now on, for as long as you live, just the simple act of getting out the bowl to make Chocolate Stuff will have an incredibly assuaging effect on your psyche. I can say, without fear of contradiction, there is virtually nothing, not one situation, that can’t be faced with calm and grace and serenity if you have Chocolate Stuff. You can eat it and feel better fast, and when it wears off, you can just make another batch. Believe me, in no time at all, you’ll be grinning like a mule eating briars.