Brown Town: A mayo brownie failure

What I was Expecting

My mom is the grand master substituter when it comes to baking. I was raised on cookies made with prunes and carob instead of butter and chocolate. Her most recent triumph over conventional cooking was her use of tahini and chicken fat in some sort of faux-cookie creation. I have only recently begun to enjoy cookies for the first time. 

I do have to say that I have caught the substitution bug in my own cooking. But with an astoundingly lower success rate than my mothers. My most recent failure? Mayonnaise brownies. 

I was always taught that you could use mayonnaise as a replacement if you were out of eggs…and for some reason you needed some sort of baked good right then and you had no possible way to get to a carton of eggs in time to quell the dessert induced storm that was raging in your bosom.

So last night I got the hankering, and guess what? No eggs. And so I thought, "No problem!" I mixed up the batter, threw in a couple of scoops of mayo out of the old mayo jar and 40 minutes later was drawn to the oven on the scent of brownies. 

Upon opening the oven door I found this:

What I got.

Turns out you can't use the kind of mayo with olive oil in it. I'm not sure the picture does these brownies justice. Basically they had formed themselves into a semi-edible brick with a lake of boiling oil on top. 

You know though? Once you drained the oil off and patted them dry….

they were still terrible.

And yeah, I still ate them. 

Deal.

loaf-

rachel

note: this was written pre-vegan