Buck's Brownies©

Last night, right as I was sitting down to watch the season finale of Heroes (which was great, by the way), I got an email from a former fellow Norwegian missionary/pseduo-fiancé (it's a long story that I'll regale you with at another time). Anyway, just like on the movie "National Treasure," she'd uncovered a holy grail everyone... even this item's creator... thought was lost to the sands of time. Yes, she had rediscovered the lost recipe of Buck's Brownies©! Self-declared "The ONLY Decent Brownies in the Universe." They were the most coveted and delicious of all the missionary brownies we had in Norway. The last time I was able to partake in their ambrosia-like perfection was in a little village in southern Norway near the end of the last century and with the disappearance of any known copies of the recipe, the next time I thought I'd get to taste them was at the welcome reception they host in the Celestial Kingdom.

You may think that I'm exaggerating about these brownies, but they truly were legendary. Everyone talked about them in hushed whispers and passed the recipe, carefully crafted by none other than "The Buck" himself, (actually, his name was Dan Buck, but he was never called Dan or even "Elder Buck" which would have been what we should have called him... he was just "Buck.") only to our closest friends.

In one of my areas, I sustained a sledding injury (another story for a later time) and was housebound for several weeks. Well, my companion and I lived on muesli and these brownies. Seriously, we made a batch a day for several weeks. In fact we were constantly running low on eggs (and money, as eggs are very expensive in Norway) as the recipe calls for A THIRD OF A DOZEN EGGS (okay, that's only four, but a third of a dozen sounds more impressive)! It's a good thing we were young, as these brownies have enough cholesterol to require you to dissolve Lipitor in the milk you drink with them. It was here that we discovered the rebellious-feeling modification to alter the recipe, replacing the almond extract with rum extract. Mmmmm. Sacrilicious!

Okay, one more Buck's Brownie's© story before you're completely bored of me talking about dessert. One time, a visiting church General Authority from Salt Lake was visiting the Norway mission. It was a HUGE thing, and every missionary in the country came to Oslo to hear him. Since I was serving in Oslo at the time and knew the scheduling secretary pretty well, I hand picked the exact missionaries who would be staying at our apartment. Needless to say, it wasn't the group you'd expect to stay up late into the night discussing the scriptures and gospel principles and kneeling in prayer. What we did stay up late into the night doing... and I'm talking about 4 or 5 in the morning... was play games and, you guessed it, eat Buck's Brownies©. The elder who made them refused to let anyone eat them unless they were frosted. And since we'd run out of powdered sugar, we needed to walk to the 7-11 a mile away to get some. It was around midnight when we set out on that trek, and the entire group... all 10 of us... had to go because no one trusted that those left behind wouldn't eat the brownies while we were gone. After getting back and frosting the brownies, we then had enough sugar in our systems to keep us buzzed until almost 5 am. The General Authority talk was at 9 am, so it should come as no surprise that none of us really heard much of the talk. I don't blame myself as much as I do the Buck's Brownies© for my spiritual downfall.

Now, without further ado, I give you the actual recipe, written in The Buck's OWN HANDWRITING, and written on a sacred missionary weekly planning sheet, to boot! Enjoy! (But don't forget the Lipitor.)


(click on the image for a larger version)

Thanks, Jennifer. From your discovery, the world will never stumble in the dark without the recipe for Buck's Brownies©.