So far it's advertisements 2, editorial content 0

I'm afraid I haven't had enough coffee yet this morning to formulate the appropriate play on gender ambiguity here. But really. Brownies in two different forms. What could be better? The "make a billion variations with one dough" theme is a popular one in the fifties, and always more pronounced at Christmas. It's as if people felt obligated to produce the same variety they were seeing in the supermarket out of their own ovens, but really couldn't be bothered, so they just faked it.

Nowadays, we have books (actual books that you can buy, for money) that tell you how to add ingredients to cake mixes, whose selling point used to be that you didn't have to add much to them. Life is funny.

I don't know what's up with the pink icing, but I don't care. It's chocolate.

Tomorrow, just to make sure we don't end on an up note, a few examples of the more dubious ad-based recipes from this volume.

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