I bought a Shaina and Waterfall from Fantastic Plants. Both are much healthier than what I've seen in nurseries around here, AND more expensive. The man was always very helpful and fun to talk to. There seemed to be very minimal damage from packing and shipping, just a couple of twigs here and there were broken. I would have done worse damage hauling them in my car. I'll buy again, if I can find some more room.

"Concrete" brownies are a symptom of over-baking and reminds us of our own past baking failures and the subsequent purchase of an oven thermometer, or having the oven recalibrated for accurate baking temperatures. - There's two basic types of brownies, fudgy gooey ones, or cake-like ones. - Make sure you use a recipe for the type of brownie you want to produce to begin with. Trying to make cake-like brownies into gooey ones just doesn't work as well as choosing the correct recipe to begin with. - Be sure to use the correct size pan for the recipe. - As khandi mentioned, they are best stirred by hand or else you develop too much gluten in the flour. - Fudgy brownies start with melted butter and chocolate. If you want that molten gooey texture, don't over-bake them. The recipe will also have a lot of sugar in it. - If you want a cake-like brownie, choose a recipe that uses cake-making techniques - creamed fat and sugar, etc. These recipes will often have more eggs in them. - To help brownies stay moist longer, let them cool completely before cutting. Cutting while they are still warm releases the moisture. - To test for doneness, start checking them 5-10 minutes before the time specified in the recipe. One source mentions NOT inserting the toothpick in the middle, but insert it halfway between the center and the edge, in order to keep from over-baking them. Some moist crumbs should be adhearing to the toothpick. It's always better to err with under-done, rather than over-done, brownies. If they are under-done, just stick them in the refrigerator to firm up. If they are over-done, time for some hot fudge sauce. Let the dry brownies soak up the hot fudge sauce for 10 minutes, then serve with ice cream. No one will know "what condition their condition was in" prior to the secret sauce remedy. - If you want an ultra-smooth texture, use cake flour instead of all-purpose flour. - I found a plastic (picinic) knife is best for cutting brownies and bars. Read the hint somewhere and was completely sold the first time I tried it. -Grainlady

Thanks, everyone. I rested ALL day yesterday, and staying home from work today. Bad head cold... but I'll never regret the effort I put in to making it a special time. I've received some nice comments that warm my heart. I had planned to make a lemon cake (Ina Garten's Lemon Pound Cake) but my husband became sick in the middle of the week, then I started feeling sick on Friday, so I nixed that idea in case we had to cancel the event at the last minute. So, I went with my original plan to serve lemon sorbet which was a light and refreshing alternative on a warm evening. I loved the cheeses, alone or on the crackers or Almondina cookies (Original flavor). Good Earth iced tea is a perfect dessert tea -- spicy flavors and sweet on its own without any sugar. We sat outside in the patio and enjoyed a nice evening together.

"You, Grainlady, may actually create a new recipe out of your head, but, don't you think it may already exist somewhere?" Yes and no..... As the old saying goes, "there is no new thing under the sun" but...... If you study food science and food history, you'll find baker's ratios have been well established throughout the ages, and they have evolved as new foods, methods, and machinery were developed, and that's what I use to develop recipes. Bread made before hard winter wheat was developed, as well as methods for milling it (in the mid 1870's), was made with soft wheat and was entirely different, and the method for making it was completely different. Naturally-leavened breads are made differently than breads made with baker's yeast, which was developed during WWII and revolutionized bread making, but it's all "bread" made with common ingredients and some common ratios. There have been well established "rules" for making bread, then in 1945 out came a booklet entitled "Bake the No-Knead Way" Ann Pillsbury's Amazing Discovery, and you could save up to 1/2 your baking time. Next came "Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day", with another revolutionizing method. But you still get "bread". Those were methods and recipes they developed. There is a proportion we maintain between ingredients for most baked goods and they are well established and easily found and followed. Biscuit recipes are fairly standard, but there are all kinds of recipes for biscuits because a few ingredients have been altered, and new add-ins make them "new and improved", but it's still a biscuit. We know that there are ingredients that are tenderizers (fat and sugar) and ingredients that are structure builders (flour and eggs). A standard plain cake has, by measure, 1/3 as much fat as sugar; 2/3 as much milk as sugar; and about three times as much flour as liquid. The ratio worked for my grandmother who used a coffee or tea cup to measure the ingredients without a real recipe, or my mother who used a pint canning jar with a sketchy recipe handed down from her mother, or me with my fancy stainless steel measuring cups and exact measurements, but still using a similar ratio of ingredients that make a cake. But take Red Velvet Cake as an example. It's essentially a chocolate cake with a bottle of red food coloring added to it, whether that was by accident or intentionally. It's a cake using a common ratio of ingredients - with a new twist. Up until then there were plenty of chocolate cake recipes, but only one Red Velvet Cake - and now you will find many adaptations of it - and "Red Velvet" is turning up in all kinds of baked goods, not just cake. When you alter ingredients significantly from "normal standards", such as in the 37 Calorie Brownies, you have to find ways to use alternatives to meet your recipe goals. Sarah Phillips of "Baking 9-1-1" fame (great book and web site) made 100 versions of a low-fat white cake before she was happy with it. That's a cake recipe she developed - she didn't invent "cake". More science... When fat and sugar are reduced for the sake of calories, you will compromise the tenderness. Buttermilk and fat-free yogurt make good low-fat substitutes in recipes that aid tenderness and richness without fat. If you use chemical no-calorie, sugar-free substitutes or stevia, you've sacrificed tenderness and browning. The recipe for 37 Calorie Brownies is what it is....according to the person who developed it. Although it had little in common with brownies, other than the name, anyone who makes the recipe will probably find ways to alter the original recipe unless they like it just like it is. I made a low-carb version of Coconut Pecan Filling/Frosting (a recipe I developed) to top the recipe to make it "better" than just the plain recipe. I wasn't concerned with the number of calories, but I liked that it was wheat-free. In order to alter the 37 Calorie Brownie recipe to be more like traditional brownies, study what makes a brownie a brownie. Do you want it fudgy or cakey? What kind of mouth-feel, because this recipe is smooth and creamy and nothing like cake. Differences in cocoa powder and chocolate in a brownie recipe might be interesting (something America's Test Kitchen has explored, I'm sure). What would happen if you refrigerated the batter before baking it? Added nut flour (such as almond flour) or coconut flour to make it more cake-like? This is how you develop a recipe, and when it's finished, it has little in common with the original, if you make enough changes. Several years ago I developed cookie recipes for a local sorghum mill. The cookies and recipes were featured at a "Taste of Kansas Tour" at the mill. They are recipes I created myself, but they were based on common baker's formulas and common baking science. For convenience, I first developed a base recipe that would make nearly any kind or flavor of a cookie, then I altered it with add-ins and substitutes. If you find a Nutella White Sorghum Flour Cookie Recipe, it's probably mine. I've shared it on this message board many times. I've developed a multi-grain baking mix called "Good-For-You Baking Mix" and recipes to use it in, but I'm not the first person to come up with the idea - even Betty Crocker didn't develop Bisquick originally - a cook on a train developed it so he had a short-cut mixture with which to make biscuits quickly - as needed. I developed a multi-grain pancake mix one Christmas to add to food baskets at church, and we call it "Christmas Pancake Mix"- not the first, but the one using ingredients common in my pantry, like Morning Moo's Whey-Based Milk Substitute and grains I mill myself. My original recipe for a low-carb granola dubbed "Nutola" because there are more nuts than grain, and low-glycemic sweeteners, isn't the first granola recipe, just my version of one I developed. I've developed recipes 18-years ago using agave nectar (when it was nearly impossible to find), and even won $500 in a low-glycemic recipe contest using 2 of those recipe. At the time, my agave nectar sweetened recipes were the only ones I'd ever seen, but I used honey as a guideline for the recipes I developed. -Grainlady