VillageToolbox Blog

I’ve been working on the Ad engine for the last couple of weeks, and I just noticed last night that the New Account creation had a nasty bug that stopped it from working. I apologize to anyone who was affected, but to make it up, I’m sharing the recipe for our ‘Not Really Very Good Brownies’ that got rave reviews at our park bake sale on Saturday.

Dahlia and I spent a couple of years perfecting this recipe, so enjoy, and here ya go…

• 3/4 cup butter
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 tablespoons water
• 200 g dark chocolate (good quality. We use the PC Swiss Dark), broken into pieces
• 3 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2/3 cup flour
• 1 cup white chocolate pieces (belgium baking wafers from Bulk Barn work best)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.  Line a pan with teflon tin foil if desired (it makes it much easier to remove them).

Melt butter, sugar, water in saucepan, bring to boil and let boil for 2 minutes.

Take off the heat, add the chocolate and stir until melted. Let it cool for a minute, then stir in the eggs and vanilla. Add flour and mix well.

Add white chocolate and quickly pour it into the pan.

Bake for 30-35 minutes. Brownies are done when a skewer poked in the middle has wet crumbs stuck to it, but no streaks of batter.

Let the brownies set in the fridge overnight before cutting, but they are best served at room temperature.

Exciting news! We have finaly heard back from the city about our neighbourhood plans to put a permanent BBQ into the park.  This is exciting for me, because after a year of pushing and emailing, and jumping through hoops, I was beginning to believe that it was never going to happen.

So, now we have permission from the city to begin fabrication. That means no going back – they can’t change their minds once we’ve spent money of building it. It also means that the onus is now on us, the community, to move the project forward. After so long, this is an interesting turn of events. Also it means (hopefully) that I get to do some cool welding now.

We need to make a number of decisions now.  What material do we use (what can we afford). How do we design it? How do we anchor it? How do we make sure the neighbourhood teenagers don’t break it n the first 2 weeks.  So much to do!

Summertime so far has been busy, filled with camping trips, friends cottages and sunny days in the lake.  Adding this to an already full schedule has been a little difficult, and has significantly slowed down the development of VillageToolBox.  Still, it’s important to practise what you preach, and so time with the kid, and time spent on neighbourhood pursuits has overshadowed my plans for world domination.

Soon, I’ll be back into the full swing of development, and hope to really take the site live in the early fall.  Still for the time being, I have a few more sunburns to rack up.