Devil's Food Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #14)(11)

Grease and flour a 9-inch by 13-inch cake pan, or spray it with nonstick baking spray, the kind with flour added. Set it aside while you mix up the batter.

Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat on the stovetop, or put it in the bottom of a microwave-safe, medium-sized mixing bowl and heat it for 1 minute in the microwave on HIGH.

Add the light brown sugar to the mixing bowl with the melted butter and stir it in well.

Mix in the baking powder and the salt. Make sure they’re thoroughly incorporated.

Stir in the vanilla extract.

Mix in the beaten eggs.

Add the flour by half-cup increments, stirring in each increment before adding the next.

Stir in the nuts, if you decided to use them.

Mix in the butterscotch chips if you decided to use them, or any other chips you’ve chosen.

Spoon the batter into the prepared cake pan and smooth out the top with a rubber spatula.

Bake the Butterscotch Bonanza Bars at 350 degrees F. for 20 to 25 minutes. (Mine took 25 minutes.)

When the bars are done, take them out of the oven and cool them completely in the pan on a cold stove burner or a wire rack.

When the bars are cool, use a sharp knife to cut them into brownie-sized pieces.

Yield: Approximately 40 bars, but that all depends on how large you cut the squares.

You may not believe this, but Mother suggested that I make these cookie bars with semi-sweet chocolate chips and then frost them with chocolate fudge frosting. There are times when I think she’d frost a tuna sandwich with chocolate fudge frosting and actually enjoy eating it!





Chapter Four

Hannah set her purse down on the landing and unlocked her condo door. Then she backed up one step, made sure she was perfectly balanced on the balls of her feet, and opened the door. The preparations might have seemed strange to anyone who didn’t know her roommate’s habits, but the cat who chose to cohabit her condo had a unique style of greeting her at the end of a day.

“Uff!” Hannah grunted, staggering back a half-step as an orange and white, twenty-three-pound ball of fur hurtled into her arms. She caught her balance, walked through the doorway and carried the cat who shared her domicile to his favorite perch on the back of the couch. “Are you glad to see me?” she asked.

“Rrrow!” he answered, regarding her with one unblinking eye. He was blind in the other and he had a torn ear, a testament to his hard life on the streets before he’d ended up at Hannah’s condo door. It was one of the reasons she’d named him Moishe, after the one-eyed Israeli general who’d triumphed in several wars.

Hannah ducked out to retrieve the scarred leather purse her mother hated, and constantly attempted to replace at Christmases, birthdays, and even once on St. Patrick’s Day. That offering had been a snazzy little green bag that would have held Hannah’s car keys, two aspirin as long as they weren’t in the bottle, and a lace handkerchief.

“Are you hungry, Moishe?” she asked, shrugging out of her parka and tossing it on the chair by the door.

“Rrrow!”

“Okay.” Hannah glanced at the answering machine sitting on her desk and saw that the red light was blinking. “Just let me get my messages and then I’ll fix your dinner.”

“RRRRRROW!”

This time the cry was irate and Hannah stopped in mid-stride. “You’re right. I can get my messages after I feed you. How about chicken? I’ve got some I can cut up for you.”

“Rrrow.”

Moishe’s tone was soft and appreciative, and Hannah smiled as she went off to the kitchen. Whoever said cats didn’t understand words had obviously never met Moishe.

The kitchen was dark and Hannah flicked on the bank of fluorescent lights overhead. With snow white walls and white appliances reflecting the light, this turned her kitchen into something approaching the brilliance of a movie set. Perhaps she should think about painting the walls a darker color, or replacing the bulbs with a lower wattage, but she really needed to see what she was doing when she tested recipes at home.

Moishe’s skinless, boneless chicken breast was in a container on the top shelf of the refrigerator. Hannah got out a cutting board and chopped it into feline-sized pieces. Then she went back to the refrigerator to take out some crumbled bacon she’d had left when she’d made Quiche Lorraine to take to her mother’s house for one of their weekly mother-daughter dinners.

Hannah had just shut the door when she noticed something odd that was perched on top of her refrigerator. It was round and white, and she was sure it hadn’t been there this morning when she’d opened the refrigerator to get a glass of orange juice. She reached up to get it and began to frown as she realized it was a pair of her clean white socks rolled up in a ball. Her socks were supposed to be in her sock drawer in the bedroom. How had this sock ball gotten up on top of her refrigerator?

She thought about that as she added the crumbled bacon to Moishe’s food bowl. She remembered putting the laundry away on Sunday afternoon. There had been two loads to fold and her laundry basket had been heaped high with clean clothing for the coming week. She was sure she’d put all of her rolled socks away in her bedroom dresser drawer, but perhaps one pair had fallen out of the basket on her way to the bedroom, and she’d noticed it on the floor on her way to the kitchen to get a cold drink. Although she didn’t remember doing it, she could have picked up that sock ball and stowed it on top of the refrigerator while she poured herself a glass of lemonade. Out of sight, out of mind was a saying with a lot of merit to it. She’d forgotten all about the sock ball, and that’s why she’d been so surprised to see it there. People did things like that all the time. They got distracted, set things down in odd places, and then forgot they’d done it. Her own father had once confessed that he’d found his reading glasses in the refrigerator and had no recollection of putting them there.