Mission sugar rushes

Yesterday's posting and subsequent comments reminded me of how big a deal brownies were on my mission. And not the pot-filled kind, just the basic sugar-laden ones. It seems like every opportunity we had, we'd bake a batch--oftentimes eating the whole thing that evening...just between TWO missionaries! (Walking around all day getting doors slammed in your face really takes it out of you.) Everyone had his or her own recipe, until one recipe, "Buck's Brownies" (named after that immortal mission chef Dan Buck, who tirelessly altered, experimented, and ultimately perfected the brownies made by the missionaries) rose to the top. Everyone knew about them. Missionaries broke mission rules by calling other missionaries for the recipe. Missionaries gained weight making them all the time. Missionaries would run out of money halfway through the month buying ingredients for them. Missionaries broke the Word of Wisdom by adding RUM EXTRACT to them. The Norwegian mission hadn't seen this much of a sensation since 1963 when scriptures with little hand warmers built into them hit the market. (Although much to Buck's and my other missionary friends' chagrin, no one can find the recipe among their mission memorabilia. It was as if they were destined to die with our halcyon days of Scandinavian service and we now have to console ourselves with substandard Betty Crocker brownies. And to think that if someone kept it, we might have the seed recipe to start a brownie empire to rival Mrs. Fields! Blast!)

One reason I think brownies were so popular was that since we couldn't de-stress with alcohol or cigarettes or get a buzz from coffee, we turned to two legal ingredients for missionaries--chocolate and sugar. We could get a buzz from all the sugar and fat in them that just melted our days pains and problems away. Unfortunately, though this simple pleasure was corrupted into a dark monster. You know how most evil things are really corruptions of really good things? Well, the brownies in Norway spawned an awful, evil, poison. It was called "Sizzle." I'm not sure when it was first forged in the dark places of some disturbed missionary's mind--a mind driven mad by the lack of sunlight in the northern reaches of Norway; driven crazy by freezing weather; pushed to the brink by not being able to watch Baywatch. All I know is that it was a part of underground mission lore long before I got there. Sizzle was everything about brownies that you know and love--magnified to such gross proportions that it became a hideous monster, capable of halting the digestive process in humans and even goats. To make this deadly concoction, you take a basic brownie recipe and half the flour and double the sugar and butter. After baking it, the cook quickly pulls it out of the oven and scoops the thick stew into a bowl (you can't cut it--it's too soupy at this point and if you wait too long, it will turn into a mass more durable than a titanium bar) and pours milk over it. The cold milk hits the hot sugar/butter combination and starts to sizzle. The longer the sizzling, the better the sizzle. At this point, you had to dive right in and eat it as fast as possible before it turned into a brick in the bowl--better that it turn into a brick in your stomach. I only braved the stuff once, and of course it was before a Norwegian wedding reception, so I couldn't eat one Norwegian pastry, treat, or cake because my stomach was still full of a chocolate rock it probably wouldn't digest for another 24 hours. When I told my grandmother about sizzle, she said that it was a good thing that missionaries are blessed that they can withstand poisoning because any normal person would be dead after eating that. Those words of warning have prevented me from ever trying the recipe here in the States--well, that and the fact that I'm no longer capable of processing 12,000 calories in one sitting.