I had a talent, back in my school days, for avoiding the classes that made you write research papers. I could kick myself now.

Of course, the two papers I managed to write were pretty boring stuff, something about the planet Jupiter, and the history of the communist party in America.

But I think the point of the boring papers, the ones you pretty much crib from the encyclopedia, is that they train to you write the interesting books, like Stacy Schiff’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Cleopatra.

Last week, all I knew about Cleopatra was Elizabeth Taylor and pointy eyeliner.

This week, I’m insufferably smarter.

Schiff assumes you know your Marc Antonys, your Octavians, your Ptolemy dynasties. That’s where she nearly lost me. But she engaged my imagination so thoroughly, I didn’t want to give up on her.

So I reached for Wikipedia, looking up people as I went. It saved me big-time. I managed to keep all these ancient celebrities straight.

Because you will want to keep them straight, the better to enjoy this real-life account of conniving, adultery, murder, and conspicuous consumption. No doubt soap opera writers have been stealing ideas from these folks for decades.

Cleopatra was raised in Alexandria, Egypt, a city that borrowed from the best of Greek culture. If you had to be born in a world before penicillin, telephones and blow-dryers, you couldn’t do better than this ancient wonder with all its libraries, museums, shipyards and colonnaded avenues.

I am so sorry to have missed out on it. Alexandria and the ancient Mediterranean world sound like a balmy paradise, far different than today’s hole of human desperation.

I am, however, happy to have missed out on their custom of marrying brothers and sisters to each other. And as for their baby care ideas, well, I’ll leave you to discover how they offered relief to a teething infant.

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As much as I lament my inferior education, it was not a total waste. The cafeteria at the student union served these diet-destroying brownies. I tried for years to recreate them, but I was never satisfied.

One lucky day, I opened the alumni magazine and stumbled onto the official recipe:

BYU MINT BROWNIES

  • 1 cup butter
  • 1/2 c. Cocoa
  • 2 TB honey
  • 4 eggs
  • 2 cups sugar
  • 1 3/4 cups flour
  • 1/2 TB baking powder
  • 1/2 tsp. Salt

Mint Icing:

  • 5 TB butter, softened
  • Dash of salt
  • 1 TB light corn syrup
  • 2 1/3 cups powdered sugar
  • 1/2 tsp. Mint extract
  • 1-2 drops green food coloring
  • 3 TB milk

Frosting:

  • 12 oz. Chocolate frosting (canned)

1. Melt butter and mix in cocoa. Allow to cool. Add honey, eggs, sugar, flour, baking powder and salt. Mix well. Pour batter into a greased 9×13-in. baking pan. Bake at 350′ for 25-35 minutes, or until a toothpick comes out with a few moist crumbs. Cool.

2. Prepare Mint Icing: mix butter, salt, corn syrup and powdered sugar. Beat until smooth and fluffy. Add mint and food coloring. Mix. Add milk gradually until the consistency is a little thinner than cake frosting.

3. Spread Mint Icing over brownies. Place brownies in the freezer for a short time to stiffen the icing. Remove from the freezer and carefully add a layer of chocolate frosting.

305 calories per brownie

Confession time: I worked as a dishwasher for a few months at the Wilkinson Center. The bakery would send in their empty brownie pans, still edged with frosting.

Did we “clean” the pans before we washed them?

Yeah, kinda.