Meal Stretcher Monday: Brownie Bites

My Husband has a weakness for pre-packed desserts. His ideal grocery trip likely involves buying his weight in PopTarts. For the sake of convenience, he picked up some Little Bites Brownie Bites to throw into lunch boxes or keep kids quiet in the car (okay, that actually wasn't a bad idea).

The problem is that this little box here contains 5 envelopes of 3 brownie bites each, and costs around $3.50.

Nope. I can do better.

Thankfully, I have this pan here:

The wells are the same size as the Little Bites, but there are 24 of them instead of 15. Already we're on a roll.

You can use a mix (usually about $1.50), or if you have the ingredients, make them from scratch with a recipe like the Best Brownies recipe from Hershey's.
Fill your wells, and bake!

(Pardon the mess along the sides of the wells. There was a toddler attached to my leg chanting "browniebrowniebrowniebrowniebrownie".)

Note: these wells are small! You'll need a MUCH shorter cooking time (mine took 8 minutes). Had I tried to leave them for the 25 minutes in the original recipe I would have had charcoal briquettes.

Voila!

It's a messy picture. I planned to take a better one with them all stacked nicely on a plate, maybe with a glass of milk in the background.... Too late. I was overruled and the brownies were gone way too fast.

Let's look at the savings here. Assuming that 3 brownies is a serving...

Little Bites: 5 servings for $3.50. That's $0.70 per serving.

Mix: 8 servings for $1.50. That's under $0.19 per serving.

Mine were from scratch and since I had all of the materials, they cost me nothing.

I know what's going into our lunch boxes.