Josiah's Birthday Flop

Josiah wanted brownies for his birthday yesterday and they wanted me to make them (I thought Grace was the brownie queen! anyways...) So, Mom wanted me to make "uncle bob's quick brownies" from scratch. First, let me tell you, they are not quick, especially when you are working with frozen butter because someone forgot to leave it on the counter, or even the refrigerator. So, trying to get is soft without melted was a disaster. We ended up with half melted, half frozen butter clumps. I know that we don't use a beater to mix it because they will be crumbly but how else was I going to "mix" frozen butter into the batter. After about 30 seconds, people realized that I was beating it and hollered at me to stop. So, we left the batter on the counter for about an hour-hour and a half, while we ate and such, in hopes that the butter would soften naturally. It never did. So, we finally just put it on the oven with butter clumps. Then Mom's oven went wacko... more than usual. So, the temp. would swing from about 415* to 200*. After about 30 minutes, it looked done and so I went to pull it out. A tidal wave rippled through the middle. Back in the oven it went. About 20 minutes later, the top was utterly burnt and the middle was barely cooked. Josiah came in to see what was happening and stopped dead in his tracks and said "Um, WHAT is that?" and we replied "your birthday cake." The only thing left to do way scrape the top. We cut about the first 1/2 inch off the top and it look hideous. It tasted okay but we were glad for the ice cream (and Ricky's mini cheesecakes!!) Okay, so then we go to do candles... mom only has about 7 regular candles. So we get the long wavey wax candles out... the brownies are still hot and the candles start melting from the inside of the brownies and falling over.... okay... let's try those long matches... So we light them. But fire doesn't burn down, it burns up and by the time we get the cake to Josiah, complete our singing AND counting, the candles have snuffed themselves out. So, he got a ugly cake and no candles... poor Josiah. Life... or something like it.