National Brownie Day (Holiday Hoopla 2023)

National Brownie Day
Holiday Hoopla 2023
Answer	Click to revealPIVOTAL
Statistics
No. solves	82
No. total guesses	138
Links
Puzzle	Link

National Brownie Day is a word puzzle from Holiday Hoopla 2023. Its difficulty level is categorized as Easy relative to the other puzzles in the hunt.

The puzzle is presented as a column of images of brownies on the left, a column of text in the middle, followed by a column of images of other foods on the right.

Solve Path

 

Solvers may notice that the words in the middle column serve as captions for the food items located to the right. While this may be one of the easier observations to make initially, this fact will not be used right away in the solve path.

Solvers may also notice that while the images in the left column are all images of brownies, the number of brownies in each image varies.

The flavor text indicates that "X always chooses brownies before other dessert slices, and words before letters." This is a clue to the sequence of steps in the solve path: solvers should use some information pertaining to the brownies before doing the same with the desserts at a later step; likewise, words will be involved, followed by letters at a later step.

The text is always a multi-word phrase with at least as many words as the number of brownies in that row. This fact allows solvers to proceed row by row and use the number of brownies to index into the phrase by word.

 

Using the Number of Brownies with the Phrase

Row	Brownie Count	Phrase	Indexed Word
1	1	Pumpkin Pie with Whipped Cream	Pumpkin
2	1	Gingerbread House	Gingerbread
3	3	White Chocolate Velvet Cake	Velvet
4	2	Microwaveable Oatmeal with Blueberries	Oatmeal
5	2	Homemade Tiramisu	Tiramisu
6	5	Red and White Striped Candy Canes	Candy
7	1	Lemon Bars	Lemon

The desserts on the right follow a similar pattern to the brownies in that there is a varying number of the item depicted.

Solvers can apply the same strategy from earlier, this time using the count of the desserts within each image as the index and the word previously chosen from the phrase as the target. The result from this process will be a single letter.

 

Using the Extracted Word with the Desserts

Row	Indexed Word	Dessert Count	Extracted Letter
1	Pumpkin	4	P
2	Gingerbread	2	I
3	Velvet	4	V
4	Oatmeal	1	O
5	Tiramisu	1	T
6	Candy	2	A
7	Lemon	1	L

Reading the letters together results in the answer Click to revealPIVOTAL.

Puzzle Elements

 

Indexing - Indexing is used twice: first to select a word from a phrase and later to select a letter within that word.