When I was growing up, there were two kinds of cake my mom made for nearly every celebration – a delicious, super-rich chocolate cake, and an equally delicious rum cake, both of which came from newspaper recipes, and involved a box of cake mix. These were the first two things I learned to bake and they were, for a long time, other than from-the-bag chocolate chip cookies or from-the-box brownies (and also my sister’s favorite butterscotch chip oatmeal cookies) the only things I ever really baked. But then, back in November, a friend of mine had a birthday party, and since I discovered a while ago that bringing home-made food to a party is a damn good gift, I offered to bake something, asking what flavors in particular he liked. He told me he was a sucker for chocolate and mint, which sounded easy enough to deal with, and I went on a search for a mint brownie recipe, a search that would, in some totally unexpected ways, lead to a whole new hobby and part of my life.
