My mother taught us to bake cookies and cakes from an early age. Two of our favorite recipes were her saucepan brownies and saucepan brown sugar brownies. All you needed was a saucepan and a pan to bake them. You started with melting the chocolate, adding the butter, sugar and eggs and then the dry ingredients. Viola, they were done and ready to put in the pan to bake. With the brown sugar brownies you stated with the butter, added the brown sugar, eggs and dry ingredients and again they were ready to bake. We started making double batches because they disappeared so fast. To this day I get raves for my brownies. When I went away to college I lived with my grandmother for part of the time and she was always making what she called her applesauce coffee cake. I never asked her for the recipe until after I was married with children and we were visiting. She was so thrilled because she said no one else in the family had ever asked her for the recipe. She wrote it out and gave it to me with two square pans to bake it in. She would cut the butter into the dry ingredients like one would do for pie crust before add the pecans and raisins to the dry ingredients. Then she would heat the applesauce and add the soda to it before mixing it into the dry ingredients. The only change I've made is to use some whole wheat flour when I make it. I still have the recipe she wrote out for me and have saved it for my daughter.

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