Brownies, Homesickness, and a Kitchen I’m Finally Using

February in West Sussex is a bleak little month, and nobody pretends otherwise. The trees are still bare. The sky sits about three feet above your head. The pavements are wet in a way that seeps into your socks regardless of what you’ve spent on boots. It’s the month where you realise the novelty of the London winter wore off approximately six weeks ago and you’ve still got a solid chunk of it to go.

So I did what any reasonable person does when the weather is unrelenting, the evenings are long, and they’re missing somewhere they love. I baked.

A Kitchen Worth Using

We’ve been in the Horsham house for eighteen months now, and I’ve only just made proper friends with the kitchen. This is not the kitchen’s fault. It’s a perfectly decent kitchen — gas hob, good oven, enough worktop to actually do something on. The problem was that for the first year back I was in full professional reconstruction mode: early starts, long train journeys, evenings spent catching up on a market I’d been out of for fifteen years. Cooking felt like one thing too many, so we subsisted largely on things Richard could produce with confidence, which means pasta and steak, and both of those are fine, but they’re not baking.

February broke me into it properly. Something about the cold, and the grey, and the particular quality of a Sunday afternoon in West Sussex when the light goes at half past three and you need something to do with your hands. I dug out my recipe notebook — the battered A5 thing I’ve been adding to since university — and found what I was looking for.

Gemma found me at the kitchen counter with the cocoa out and immediately appointed herself quality control. She is fourteen and has been quality control on this brownie since she was approximately four, which is to say she has always eaten at least one square before it’s properly cool and has never once expressed remorse about it. This time she ate two, standing at the counter, and announced that it was “probably better than anything in England.” High praise from a fourteen-year-old who has been expressing reservations about England since we landed.

The Brownie

The Pandoro Fudge Brownie. Pandoro was a bakery in Mt Eden — one of those neighbourhood places so good you take them entirely for granted until you can’t get there anymore — and their brownie was the standard against which I measured every brownie I ate for twenty years. Gemma tracked down the recipe online and it’s been forced, one delicious square at a time, into my repertoire ever since. I make it the way Gemma likes it, which is using both white and milk chocolate.

The recipe, because you deserve it:

• 100g cocoa.

• 200g butter, melted.

• 400g caster sugar.

• 4 eggs.

• 1 teaspoon vanilla.

• 90g plain flour.

• 1 teaspoon baking powder.

• 200g chocolate chips.

Sift the cocoa into a large bowl. Add the melted butter, sugar, eggs and vanilla, and beat into a smooth paste — it will look alarmingly liquid and you’ll be convinced you’ve done something wrong. You haven’t. Sift in the flour and baking powder, fold through the chocolate chips, and pour the whole glossy business into a 20 x 30cm tin lined with baking paper.

Bake at 150°C for 65 minutes. I know. It sounds wrong. Low temperature, long time, and when you pull it out it will look underdone. It isn’t. It sets as it cools into something fudgy and dense and almost embarrassingly good. The temptation to give it another ten minutes will be strong. Resist.

Let it cool completely before you cut it. I have never once managed this.

How to Eat It

Warm. Not hot — ten seconds in the microwave, or a few minutes in a low oven, until the chocolate chips are just beginning to give. Proper vanilla ice cream on top — the kind with the little black flecks. None of the yellow variety that tastes like custard’s less ambitious cousin.

On the sofa. Heating on. Something undemanding on the television. The point is the contrast — warm fudgy brownie, cold sharp ice cream — and the point is eating something that tastes like home in a country that, after eighteen months, still occasionally feels like someone else’s.

Richard had two pieces and then a third and then said, with the air of a man making a formal announcement, that this was the best thing to come out of that oven since we moved in. Gemma, who had already eaten two squares off the cooling tray and was now demanding a proper serving with ice cream, took mild issue with the implication that there had been meaningful competition.

The Things I Can’t Make

The brownies help. They genuinely do. But they’re not the whole story, because the homesickness isn’t really about baking. It’s about the people who bake, and the kitchen they bake in, and the particular weight of a place you know by heart.

The entire time I was in New Zealand, I missed my Mum’s lemon cake. The one she’s been making as long as I can remember — moist crumb, proper lemon drizzle soaked in while it’s still warm, the top going slightly crunchy as it cools. She makes it for birthdays and Sunday visits and no particular reason at all. I have a version of the recipe. My version is good. It is not the same as hers, and I have come to accept that the difference might simply be that I’m making it in my rented house’s kitchen and not my Mum’s, and some things taste like the room they were made in.

I miss the easy weekend routine we had in Mt Eden. Coffees from Fraser’s or Circus Circus, feijoas from the neighbours in summer, mandarins in winter, and my guilty pleasure of a vanilla custard scroll from Baker’s Delight. Richard in the garden when I got back. Gemma, once she was old enough, coming with me to KC Loo in the Village — carrying the shopping bag with great seriousness and extremely firm opinions about which apples to buy. She was about seven the first time she came and she negotiated the price of a feijoa bag with a directness that I found both impressive and slightly mortifying.

I think Gemma is homesick too, though she wouldn’t use that word for it and would probably dispute the framing if I raised it. She doesn’t miss New Zealand the way I miss it — she’s grieving something more total than that, because New Zealand isn’t somewhere she went, it’s who she is. On Saturday mornings here she’s often quiet in a particular way. She texts her Dio friends a lot. She watches Warriors highlights at a volume that suggests she’s reassuring herself they still exist. I don’t say anything about any of this. She’s fourteen and she’s working it out, and the best thing I can do is keep the kitchen warm and the biscuit tin stocked and be present when she wants to talk, which is not always when I expect her to.

What I’ve Decided About Homesickness

I used to think homesickness was a weakness. Something you were supposed to push through, or distract yourself out of, or simply grow out of at some point in your mid-twenties. I don’t think that anymore. I think it’s just love, pointed in a direction you can’t currently reach. And trying to talk yourself out of it is about as useful as trying to talk yourself out of missing a person. You can manage it. You can’t dissolve it. You just have to give it somewhere to go.

For me, right now, it goes into the kitchen. The smell of butter and cocoa and sugar. The exact heft of the wooden spoon. The particular anxiety of the sixty-five-minute bake, where you have to trust the recipe even though everything looks wrong. There’s something in that last bit that I find, on the better days, a bit instructive.

The brownies came out perfectly. I ate one standing at the worktop before they’d cooled, because I never learn. Gemma had two more after dinner with an amount of ice cream that I chose not to comment on. Richard finished the rest over the course of the weekend with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has discovered something good and intends to be methodical about it.

I hid the last two at the back of the fridge. For myself. I’m not sorry.

Into March. The trees are starting. I can feel it.