A Word Problem

An engineer can prepare brownies in the following manner:
It takes three minutes to crack and beat eggs and seven more minutes to mix all the ingredients together. Brownies made in a 9x13 pan take 24 minutes to bake while brownies baked in a muffin tin take 20 minutes. However, it only takes one minute to pour brownie mix in a 9x13 pan but four minutes to spoon the mix into a muffin tin. Left alone, baking pans take 10 minutes to cool, but cooling can be sped up by four minutes by placing pans into the freezer. Brownies baked in muffin tins can be removed in a minute, while brownies in the 9x13 pan need five minutes to be cut and removed (muffin removal is done after the pans cool). One 9x13 pan makes 48 brownies.

Mixing ingredients has to be done after beating eggs, but there are two bowls for brownie mix. There is only one 9x13 pan but two twelve-cup muffin tins and two six-cup muffin tins. How long does it take two engineers to bake 144 brownies in the 9x13 pan and 42 brownie-muffins, for a total of 186 brownies?

Answer: much too long, or around two and a half hours, with help from a very kind friend. So my engineering friend sucked me into asked if I would help her put together care packages for AAIV. In the spring and fall, AAIV puts together packages with candy, school supplies, and information about AAIV for people who give us contact information. This is our way of following up on our initial invitation to join or visit AAIV, and I got a nice care package last fall, so I agreed to help.

After a two-hour trip to Wal-Mart involving 20 packages of pens, several supersized bags of candy, and five boxes of brownie mix, we got down to making 200 brownies. Anyone should be able to make brownies from a mix, right? Besides preheating the oven, there’s one instruction: mix together two eggs, ¼ cup of water, 2/3 cups of vegetable oil, and the mix. Well, it’s apparently not that simple. Solving quadratic functions is simple. Balancing chemical reactions is simple. Making brownies from a boxed mix? Not so much. Welcome to Cooking With Engineers.

Yes, we can predict the probability of an electron’s location in a hybrid sp³ orbital in a methane molecule, but no, we cannot follow directions to make brownies from a boxed mix. We are going to do well in the real world.

Eventually, we did reach our goal of just under 200 brownies after much mixing, and spilling, and scraping brownies out of not-very-well-greased-pans (I take responsibility for that one). We did not set the fire alarm off and nobody got burned or sliced a finger open. Success.

The brownie making process before we spilled mix, oil, and egg
all over the counter

One last word problem: How many flights of stairs does it take to go from the third floor to the fourth floor (of the same building)? [Hint: It’s not one.]

Answer: Three. That’s a story for another time.