Sand Art Brownies

This weekend was my Dad's birthday so I drove the long way home to Plano to spend the weekend with my family. It's pretty easy to persuade me to go home when there is free food and potential shopping with the mom involved.

My family is pretty big believes in birthday weekends rather than a birth-day so Friday night my parents and I went out to eat at a small, cozy italian food restaurant for dinner. They have one of my dads favorite italian dishes, baked ziti. His favorite dessert, however, is at a restaurant called Red's where they have the best coconut cream pie. So after dinner, we drove to Red's to pick up dessert and head home. The rest of the night was spent in our pajamas watching multiple episodes of Grey's Anatomy. I got my Mom into the show this summer and we managed to get through 5 seasons and she is still trying to catch up so she can watch the current season. Whenever my brother is not around, my mom and I usually get our way and get to watch Grey's. My dad probably won't admit the amount he likes it, but never complains when we watch it...that is, until my brother comes over and then he will say the occasional "turn that crap off".

Saturday was a day filled with errands (and shopping!!) which ended with the grocery store. I had decided that I was going to make sand art brownies, another one of my dad's favorite desserts. They are easy to make and sounded good with steaks and baked potatoes. It was lucky that I had the ingredients memorized from making the brownies so many times.

When I got home, I put on the iPod, my mom poured us each a glass of wine and she got cooking and I got baking. I have been making this recipe since I was probably in 8th grade so it is pretty hard to screw up. What is cool about this recipe is that I initially got it from one of the students in my mom's class. One year, at Christmas, she brought home a glass jar that had a bunch of different colorful layers of ingredients. It consisted of all the dry ingredients for Sand Art Brownies so all you had to do was add eggs, vanilla and vegetable oil to make the brownies.

After a delicious dinner, we had the brownies (that were still warm) with some ice cream. What a perfect combination. My grandparents, brother, Callie (his girlfriend), and parents all ate while we watched my dad open up his birthday gifts.

I'm happy to say the brownies turned out MUCH better than my caramel apples turned out last week. Sadly, my roommates weren't there to try them so I will still get another week of grief about the stupid caramel apples until I bake something else here.