A word of warning on Alton Brown recipes:

they're bland as fuck.

I have yet to make an Alton Brown recipe twice. Everything he does is micromanaged, ultra-precise and utterly devoid of pleasure. Nothing he does is bad per se; it's just underwhelming for the effort involved (and he's all about effort).

The approach I've settled on for new recipes is to look it up on allrecipes and make the one with the most reviews. That way, at least, I know I'm making something utterly bomb-proof. I then modify it until it suits. They've got a turkey soup recipe, for example, that I've tripled the veggies, halved the veggies, left out the turkey, made it with vegetable or chicken broth, halved the butter, halved the cream, substituted milk for cream, substituted skim milk for cream, and accidentally forgotten the cream entirely and it still comes out good.

these look pretty bomb-proof. You could skip the honey and substitute bourbon or amaretto for the vanilla and have it turn out all right. It's really going to come down to how good your cocoa powder is. Alton Brown, on the other hand, is firmly convinced it's all about sifting this and sifting that and whipping this and whipping that and fuck the ingredients, by the way.

You can literally buy a box of Duncan Hines, stir some eggs into it with a fork, spray a pan with Pam and bake for 5 minutes too long and be fine.

"Proof positive that technique is just as important as ingredients."

Jesus fucking christ. thirteen "ounces" of sugar... or like 1.92 cups or some shit. I mean... okay, if your deity requires self-flagellation before the triple-beam balance, fuckin' go that way. But the weight of your brown sugar is going to drop by half based on how packed it is and how long it's been sitting in the pantry so I'd maybe save the effort.