Recently I have been going through my cookbooks trying to pare down a few. I have a TON of cookbooks, like a library’s worth. Some might think I’m doing what the Swede’s call “death cleaning” (they should think of a better term) or that I am decluttering. My children would call it thankful they don’t have to deal with it. I’m just culling the herd.
You would probably assume a person with as many cookbooks as I have, that I must be a pretty good cook and a darn good baker. You would be absolutely – WRONG. I dislike cooking and I HATE baking, mainly because I am so horrible at it, and have no patience for it. I have all of these cookbooks because I like looking at well cooked/baked food and I can still have dreams, can’t I?
Whatever genetic coding for baking I was supposed to get, I did not. My maternal grandmother was Danish and she was an awesome baker. My mother was a good cook and an awesome baker. My cousins are awesome bakers – oh and quilters! That was another gene that passed me by on my mom’s side. My children are all good cooks and great bakers (they can also quilt a bit), so why did it skip me?
I’m okay as a cook. I am not a fancy cook and as I explained in the last blog I only get to cook about six different meals, so no chance to hone those skills. It’s baking that hates me and the feeling is mutual. Once in a great while by some miraculous occurrence I will turn out something great when I bake, but the odds are against it.
When I was first married I baked a “from scratch” apple pie, crust and all. My mother-in-law who was also a great baker, even said it was a really good pie. But it was a one time fluke. My next attempts at pie baking were disasters and I shut that down immediately. I know when I am beaten.
When my children were little and had to bring treats to school they were always sent with store purchased cupcakes or cookies. I was never one of those over-achiever moms. At Christmas only, I can make the best sugar cookies ever, it’s my absolute one thing I am proud to bake, but I’ve goofed those up many times over the years as well.
Another thing that has a fifty-fifty chance of turning out ok for me are chocolate chip cookies. I don’t like the puffy ones, or the crispy ones, or the ones with lots of stuff added to them. I like the flat chewy ones like my mother-in-law made, hers were my favorite. I finally got so I could get that result most of the time and it’s because I don’t measure things accurately.
My children cringe when I am making something that requires actual measuring. I rarely use a liquid measuring cup, I just grab one of my plastic cups out of the drawer, the ones they tell me are for dry ingredients. A cup is a cup I tell them. My kids measure with precision, some even measure by weight, but that’s getting just crazy. This isn’t science after all….
The whole problem with baking is precision. I am NOT a precise person. Almost everything I do is by the seat of my pants including cooking. It has led me to some adventures in my life and my cooking has had some interesting outcomes. Quite often when I am cooking I have not checked for all the ingredients first and so I am also trying to substitute something, at varying degrees of success. Ah but baking, apparently you have to use all the correct measuring tools and measure each and every teaspoon or cup exactly. You also need all of the correct ingredients. I don’t have time for that.
If I want a cake or a muffin, I usually go buy one. I’ve learned my lessons over the years. Doing all that fussy measuring and mixing in just the right order just to end up with a disaster, who needs that? I know where to go buy my favorites, I’m good, thank you.
When I do attempt to bake something it is usually a last minute decision and never a wise one. For instance, last night at eleven-thirty I got the idea to bake a box of brownies that had been sitting in my cupboard for weeks. Yes, ever the optimist I do buy baked goods mixes. The idea came because my daughter Brittney had baked these beautiful brownies and had given me two earlier that day and now I was longing for more gooey chocolate goodness.
I heated the oven to 350 degrees and mixed together the box mix as instructed. Luckily brownies are not too complicated, eggs, water, vegetable oil. I did not have any vegetable oil and was thinking of using applesauce because I thought I’d read somewhere you can substitute that for oil in baking. I remembered Jay had this buttery vegetable oil that he uses when he makes hash browns. It had the words “vegetable oil” in it, that will work.
I also don’t have a 9 x 13 pan (because I don’t bake) so I used this smaller pan that looks like it’s 6 x 10 or something. I buttered the bottom of the pan as the box said to “grease it”, poured in my mix and popped it in the oven for thirty minutes because the box said forty for a 9 x 13. About ten minutes into the baking I got the sudden notion that maybe some mini chocolate candies would be good in part of the brownies. You can never have enough chocolate.
Now here is where it turns ugly, you bakers may want to turn away. Instead of taking the pan out of the oven and sprinkling part of the brownies with a few candies like a normal person would, I grabbed a handful of candies, opened the oven door, and tried to chuck a few on top of the brownies without burning my hand on the top oven rack. Brilliant, right?
A few fell onto one corner of the brownies, the rest landed on the bottom of the stove or on my new pizza stone that was on the rack under the pan. Before you judge my thinking remember it is now after midnight. Needless to say all the missed candies were then burning up and smoking the entire rest of the time. I was truly amazed that the smoke alarm did not go off when I opened the oven door later to retrieve my brownies. My smoke alarm near the kitchen gets a good work out, we never have to test those batteries. I was also worried my brownies would taste like smoke, I am happy to say they did not.
The thing about brownies is that it is hard to tell when they are done. I did what the box said about the toothpicks and they came out clean, I touched the top of them to see if they bounced back, I read that somewhere too, but maybe it only applies to cakes. I think they were done, I wasn’t chancing any more candies smoking away anyway, so I shut the oven down and called it good. Brownies are so naturally gooey it’s hard to tell. I’m eating them regardless. They’re chocolate.
Until next time…
Toni