The Exploding Brown Sugar Incident

The exploding brown sugar incident was something that happened by a stupid judgement call and genetics.  Seriously...my family has a history of blowing things up in the kitchen.

First there was the Egg Debacle.  One day my dad decided to hard boil a couple of eggs on the stove and walked away, got distracted and completely forgot.  I was not in the room at the time, but remember a very loud BOOM.  We all rushed to the kitchen and found egg everywhere.  Seriously, on the counter, the cabinets and even the ceiling.  Then there was the Snake Explosion.  Not a real snake, that's just the nickname we call a Magic Bag.  Again my dad, put the snake in the microwave like any other day and put it on for 2 minutes, except 2 minutes was actually typed in as 2 hours.  Oops!  Now I wasn't home that day so I did not witness the explosion, but I do remember coming home to find the microwave on the deck outside in the snow.

So yes, I claim that my explosion has something to do with genetics but it has more to do with really bad judgement.  I make really stupid judgement calls in the kitchen.  Like the time I used wax paper to line a cookie sheet and put in the hot oven.  I was originally looking for Parchment paper and when I couldn't find any I thought "wax paper is the same right?  I mean there's a picture of chocolate chip cookies sitting on wax paper on the box; it's got to work the same right?" WRONG!  Steve ended up saving the day on that one!

This time I was baking Toffee Chocolate Bars, a recipe that calls for brown sugar.  Now I knew we had some brown sugar in the pantry from a while ago however I found the sugar completely hardened as I not stored it properly.  Sigh, I knew I had a couple options.  First I put it in a shopping bag and hit it with a rolling pin - but that didn't work.  So I called on my good friend Google (what would we do without the Internet!!) who told me that if I put the hardened brown sugar in the microwave with a bowl of water and nuked it for a minute at a time the sugar would loosen.  The warning though was to absolutely only cook it for a minute at a time.  Well I did the minute at a time thing about 4 times until things started to loosen and then I had a thought.  Surely the person who wrote this wasn't trying to soften such a large piece of hardened sugar...and here is where I made my judgement call.  I'll just put this in for 3 minutes.  Well at about 45 seconds left to go I heard several crackles and a very loud popping sound.  As I carefully opened the microwave door I discovered that not only had the water in the bowl boiled over but half of the brown sugar cooked to a molasses like substance and stuck to the plate AND the rest of it had completely burst all over the microwave.

Moral of the story, follow directions especially if there is a warning!!

Fortunately, the bars turned out just fine!