Lest anyone get the idea that I’m clever in the kitchen, here is today’s tale of woe.

So I saw America’s Test Kitchen featured a recipe for Blondies, i.e., butterscotch brownies. It looked good, so I decided to try it.

After copying down the recipe, I went shopping to purchase any ingredients that my cupboard lacked. Only light corn syrup, as it happened, but I bought some extra brown sugar and pecans, just in case.

About an hour ago, I set to work.

As usual, my kitchen is so tiny, just getting all the ingredients together on the counter causes a bad case of crowding, but I persevered.

I toasted the pecans (they got slightly burnt, but not enough to concern me) and I browned the butter (only 8 tablespoons rather than 12; I filled in the rest with olive oil). Things were going, not swimmingly, but they were going.

And then I tried to open the new bottle of corn syrup. My hands just kept slipping over the bottle cap. I covered the cap with a towel. I ran it under hot water. I dug out a pliers!! 

Nothing seemed to work.

Until finally, the bottle cap gave. Of course, I was no longer in a pleasant mood by then.

Anyway, I combined all the ingredients, and then to my dismay, the batter seemed not very battery. It was a real effort to stir it, as it was just too dense. Gamely, I soldiered on and added the chopped pecans (I wasn’t going to omit them after I had gone to the trouble of toasting them).

And of course trying to mix them in made the batter even more recalcitrant.

Finally, I poured it (scraped it, actually) into the 9 X 13”  pan. It didn’t fill it.

So I stuck it in the heated oven and hoped for the best.

While it was baking, I watched the episode again.

Sadly, much too late to do anything, I discovered my mistake.

When I was copying down the ingredients, I had neglected to add three eggs!