What you’re talking about is related to empathy and how it’s processed/experienced by people with autism.
There are three types of empathy: affective, cognitive, and compassionate. Most autistics struggle with deficiencies in cognitive empathy but quite a lot of us experience affective and compassionate empathies to a
heightened—often
intensely heightened—degree.
Your brownie problem is the result of heightened affective empathy, so I copy/pasted an explanation of it below for you to read (note the last section about autistics feeling bad for inanimate objects and/or forming deep emotional attachments to them). I also pasted the link to the website in case anyone wants to read more about empathy and autism.
Autistic people & empathy: what’s the real story?
Affective Empathy
This is an unconscious, automatic response allowing you to feel what other people (and other living beings) are feeling, and is absolutely not something autistic people lack.
For example, it’s very common to find people on the spectrum who feel intensely connected to all species of animals, birds, insects etc. and the bonds they form – with creatures who live free from the endless restrictions of human social rules – can be quite extraordinary.
In the case of affective empathy, rather than having too little, autistic people can often have way too much – a condition known as ‘hyper-empathy.’
Hyper-empathic people find that even the thought of anyone or anything suffering causes them intense emotional, psychological and often physical pain. They can be highly sensitive to any changes in atmospheres, picking up on the slightest tension between people, and becoming more and more upset as they anticipate things escalating.
Since processing these powerful feelings can be really hard for them, they’ll often withdraw or go into meltdown over something that’s perfectly valid to them, yet a complete mystery to those around them.
Another way this shows itself is in the extreme personification of objects: forming deep emotional bonds with everyday items like pencils or rubber bands.
There are many examples of personification in the language we use every day (time waits for no-one/the camera loves her etc.) and also in our culture, with films such as Beauty and the Beast being very much enhanced by its singing, dancing, emoting kitchenware, but what I’m describing here is something much more overwhelming. Autistic people can become extremely upset if they feel, for example, that a specific crayon or hairbrush isn’t being used as often as the others, because it might be feeling left out. I can imagine how that sounds to anyone who’s unfamiliar with autism, but believe me, to many, many autistic people, this really does make perfect sense.