Chipotle Brownies

I once tried to convince my mom that chipotle chillies would make a great addition to her brownies. This half joke, half genuine idea was unsurprisingly met with a chuckle and a scoff, then she went on her way to bake her normal brownies. At least that is what i thought she was making. It turned out it was nothing like the brownies she used to make. Hmm.... I thought she had lost all sense of experimentation in baking.

Ever since our family relocated to denver, I was never moved by her baking even though my mom used to be quite the famous baker back in our neighborhood in Jakarta. She now hardly bakes anymore because of having to work full time, in addition to laboring in her other unacknowledged job, one of being a mom. Ever since, she's been rendered exhausted every time she comes home. She also regretted leaving behind in Indonesia her baking recipe notebook she's worked on and perfected for years. She claimed she always had to start all over again because of that. Trying and failing, again and again. Sometimes she got it right, most times... she didn't.

Baking is a very sensitive art, my mom once said. Unfortunately, the ways she honed her craft (art and craft being the same word in indonesian) took place in a particular place and time. She became familiar with how yeast interacts only with jakarta's humidity and temperature. Whereas denver is an alien place for her and for the yeasts she'd been accustomed to. Country crock margarine isn't the 'blue-band' brand she's used to. All-purpose flour seems to constantly turn against her recipes. Cups isn't grams. Liquid ounces isn't milli liters. While she doesn't mind being lost, attempting to invent a way back ,or out, requires a great amount of impetus which she's no longer afforded the time to acquire.

Perhaps that's why she turned to brownie making as opposed to breads and sweet rolls. Brownies are forgiving. You can make them in small batches. You don't have to wait for it to rise. It is relatively quick to make. You can be disappointed with the results yet still be able to wring out drops of satisfaction somehow. So my mom started playing with brownie recipes. The brownies i've grown to expect from her has the texture almost exactly like a chocalate cake. Perhaps that's the way brownies are in Indonesia as i had never tasted a fudgy brownie until i came to the states. She always thought the american version was too rich. But the many times she's attempted the classic 'indonesian' brownies here in denver, the results came out dry and stale. So imagine my surprise when i bit into this batch of brownies that tasted fudgier and denser than any other brownies she's ever made before. You might say it was a happy middle between the cake like brownies of yesterday and the american fudge brownies of today, she even laced it with a copious amount of golden raisins and topped it with chocolate icing, all completed with generous sprinklings of crushed peanuts.

It struck me as odd because this was the first time she made something that tasted like this. It may appear like a brownie i thought i knew, except it wasn't. I stared into her slightly milky, dark eyes and it was the first genuine optimism she showed at culmination of a baking ritual. An eerie and confusing sensation crawled through the back of my neck. It was not a revival of a stale nostalgia for which i always yearned each time i asked her to bake something. Neither it had the cloying flavors of what/should've/could've/would've/been lingering in the back of my tongue. It was something else. Something new, perhaps. I had this sensation only a few times before: the one time was when she first substituted collard greens for papaya leaf to make a curry with, the other time was when she kissed me in the cheeks at Liks ice cream shop late in the summertime. It was where i planned to finally tell her I was gay. The flavor she had was rum-raisin. I was trembling.

I'm afraid to attempt baking. It is an emotionally unsafe territory. The requirement of precision is one of my nameless fears. To trust and follow a measuring device is to surrender my love for unpredictability which makes my religion. Compare the act of baking to cooking stews: with stews you can fail through the process, purposefully if you'd like, and try to fix it through the addition or subtraction of an ingredient and/or simply let the stewing time work its magic. At any point in the cooking process, you can watch, taste and see it transform. Experimentation becomes just another way of quick self-gratification. It is an unstructured playground for gut feelings to run around, play tag or hide-and-go-seek, without the risk of crushing disappointments. Seasonings and spices are added according to the moods of the tongue. Textures are merely dictated by the limits of whatever meats and vegetables you happen to have on hand. Measurements are done by flippant bodily gestures that if taken outside of cooking could possibly belong in the realms of adult sexual play or adolescent diversions. Words like pinches, dashes, spits, sprinkles, palmfuls, crushes. Whatever comes out at the end does not require a name.

Baking, on the other hand, requires plenty of names. Names of proper measurements, names of exact times, names of the end products. For a novice baker like myself who's been too coddled by the perilous instinctive freedom of 'regular' cooking, baking imposes a bondage i wasn't prepared to submit to. A bondage to precision, a bondage to proper techniques, a bondage to diligence, a bondage to failure. That's why I gave up on making biscuits from scratch. Or brownies. Or corn bread. Or even pancakes, from scratch. Yet the memory of a joke, that is my dream concept of the chipotle brownies beckoned, even haunted me. I haven't baked during my free time in over two years. Occasionally I would bake deserts, biscuits, corn breads, and such at the assisted living where i work, but always from a box. It is such a banal act, completed as mere tasks and done without any passion whatsoever.

One prosaic sunday afternoon at work, i had to bake brownies for the residents as a desert after their meal of bratwursts, green beans and stuffing. I was cutting the brownies after they cooled down then I began removing them onto serving plates. There was a mess of crumbles, gooey chocolate and crusty edges left over on the pan. The residents were then still eating their meal and i decided to catch a break for myself. With my bare fingers i scraped the remains of the brownies and stuffed them into my mouth, suddenly the memories of my mother's perfect brownies came to possess the mediocre hershey box brownies i was actually eating. The cream that rises to the top of an extremely pleasurable memory can in fact infuse with and improve upon the mundane flavors of the actual food you're eating, even just for an fleeting instant. The occurrence doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it is powerful. Beware of it's peril

To wash the richness away from my mouth, i poured myself a tall glass of milk. Afterwards, i felt a nagging guilt that arose from biting, chewing and gnawing on my own sweet, yet stale nostalgia in the form of sugar and empty calories. I regretted constantly succumbing to the satan of mental auto-cannibalism where incomprehensible longing suddenly becomes a ravaging hunger that i must desperately and immediately satisfy. The beast requires nothing except that i savagely chow down any memories of pleasure that happens to be around.
That night i only ate more brownies, ice cream and milk for dinner. As a result i suffered from a sharp headache. A very unnecessary headache. For a very necessary indulgence.

Whenever i give in to my indulgence I thought about the image of myself when I was an ugly and obese baby. I must have weighed in about 30 pounds when i was only 6 months old. My hair was sparse and I never smiled in my baby pictures, my fat cheeks spilled over my jaw line making me look like an angry mythical frog. My mom said i was addicted to her milk. I asked her how she weaned me. She said i was sent away to live with my aunt in central java for a few months. Yet it still did not erase my addiction to her breasts. She then took a drastic measure of applying chillie paste around her nipples every time i had the urge to feed on her. The spicy paste burned her delicate skin around her nipples, yet i was still persistent. The combination proved to be a painful one. She claimed she was left with scars from the chillies and my bites. Yet somehow i was eventually weaned.

I wonder if that process of weaning had anything to do with my predilection for spicy food, chillies and self-flagelation. I constantly dismiss the affinity for spicy food and chillies as a cultural and social product. I grew up in a country with spicy foods, was raised by parents who fed me spicy food, i therefore inevitably would tolerate, if not 'like', spicy food. Simple explanation. As with self-flegelation, i'd also like to dismiss that as a universally human characteristic owing to the simple need for simple survival: We must go through life experiencing some degrees of pain, therefore intentional affliction of pain onto oneself is merely a case of "practice makes perfect." The weaning, however continues to fascinate me. The chillie paste on a mother's tits. The passing down of knowledge of self-denial. The denial of the body, the stuff that makes the religion. The spicy brownies laced with chillies. The denial of pleasures that eventually morphs into a ghost of pleasure itself.

And all I needed was nothing more than a pack of brownie mix and 2 dried habanero and 4 ancho chillies (re-hydrated, finely chopped, seeds and all), a third cup of water, a third cup of vegetable oil, an egg, a dash of bittersweet chocolate chips, one table spoon or two of honey, a few sprinkles of cinnamon for good measure and because of high elevation: two extra table spoons of water and a quarter cup of flour. 50 minutes in a 325 degrees Fahrenheit oven. Cool for one hour. Done.

For a second i was having a Rick-Bayless:-mexico-one-plate-at-the-time moment. A delusion that i was at a threshold of a cultural break through. For a fleeting moment I was proud. I wanted to update my facebook status and send a mass text that reads: I INVENTED THE SPICY CHIPOTLE BROWNIE, but i didn't, I was too afraid. "Spicy Chipotle" being the new fast-food/white-wash buzz word of "flavorful mexican" that traps those exotic words in an even more exotic paradox: Meaning nothing of what's actually being uttered in its original language, while simultaneously creating a new bastard, baseless definition of the words in a new bastard, baseless language. When tasted, this spicy (and i mean, spicy! i could put less habanero next time) chipotle brownie also seems to birth its own world of paradox: tasting like a puzzle of flavors that doesn't seem to fit, yet it may fulfill the promise of coherence if perfected with time, but the very coherence would mark the destruction of its very essence.

Given the spicyness, i began to eat it a-la-mode. It was my lunch and dinner on a hot wednesday afternoon (wednesday is my saturday since i work through the weekend). I welcomed the stomachache and the headache that quickly greeted me with a couple of cigarets. Looking over my balcony into downtown skyscrapers while smoking seemed trite, I know. Still, as a man i wanted to feel and appear triumphant, because i achieved my goal. I smelled my dream coming true. It smelled like chocolate and chillies. Soon, maybe very soon, everything I wanted would arrive.

I wondered whether i should call my mom to ask her how she's doing. I haven't spoken with her in weeks. I didn't want to know about the failed immigration case, or her downsized job, or the apartment payments, or my bratty little siblings, or my father. I would beg her to only give me lies and tell me about the delicious food she's been cooking and how she wanted to share them with me. I would promise not to mention, in my broken indonesian, my longing for a lost love, or my failed ok-cupid dates, or my anonymous sex with equally lonely men on craigslist, or my useless activism, or my nagging old people at the home. I would promise not to mention my ridiculous attempt to feel fulfilled through harvesting crops at the CSA, or even worse, through writing. No, I wouldn't mention any of that. I just wanna mention that i made this spicy brownie. I hoped she would chuckle.