Recipe: Laura's Brown Sugar Toast

The first time I tried this was last Wednesday, when Laura made a few slices for our dormmate dinner table in the 'Berg. Incidentally, that day was also 65 degrees outside - ridiculously warm for a January day in Boston. But one bite made me warm and fuzzy inside; I almost felt obligated to not enjoy the spring breeze and to eat oatmeal for dinner. But since the January thaw is now ending (major snow tomorrow!), I'm legitimately obligated to enjoy this.

Brown sugar and toast initally seems like a logical combination in retrospect - especially since both have gritty textures - but the more I think about it, I've only really done honey and toast, and for elevenses at that.

• 1 slice of bread
• brown sugar and butter

Take one slice of bread and toast it. During this time, take a small bowl and mix 1 teaspoon of brown sugar with one or two teaspoons (or "knife-fuls") of butter. Immediately after removing the bread from the toaster, slather the mixture onto the hot toast. There shouldn't be any visible white chunks of butter on the toast, and the brown sugar should be clumping.

Note: Our dining hall toaster (and I believe others' colleges) works like an assembly line machine. I suppose you should imagine its movement like the doughnut machinery at a Krispy Kreme shoppe. That is, you put the toast onto a moving platform where it moves toward the heat in the back of the toaster, and it suddenly falls down onto a crumb tray below the toaster. The reasoning behind this is for strangers to toast with you at the same time without waiting...but not that sketchy-sounding.

So given that platform, you could hypothetically put the brown sugar/butter mixture onto the bread, and then into the toaster...but I probably wouldn't do that. Some reasons:

1. Dude, it's against the rules? (Technically, the toaster could get set on fire, and dining services wouldn't be happy.)
2. If that doesn't happen though, don't expect your brown sugar toast to be melty good - I mean, I know that brown sugar and heat pretty much make up caramel. We used to do that in chem. But chances are that your toast is also going to get burned and turned black; word on the street is that eating that crusty black stuff causes cancer (fancy word: carcinogen.) And you really can't control the timing on your toast (unless you stick your hand in the back of the toaster to reach for your bread - um, bad idea), to boot.
3. In the final step, the newly-born toast falls off the platform into the crumb tray, possibly doing a little aerial trick in the process. That means if you put brown sugar and butter on your bread, it could possibly flip face down and collect those bagel crumbs from someone's random breakfast for you to eat. That's kind of weird.

Um...yeah. Happy eating.