It’s been many many years since I’ve baked. A long time ago, I used to be quite the baker, even venturing such exotic delights as sacher torte. I could make melt-in-your-mouth carrot cake, banana bread, and one of my best friends got to be my best friend because 17 years ago, I baked a yummilicious chocolate cake for her birthday.
Well, reminiscing aside, I was not particularly excited when M asked me to help her bake cookies for N’s pre-school Halloween party. But anyway, being the nice person I am, I agreed to tag along for moral support. Armed with Betty Crocker’s sugar cookie mix and confectioner’s sugar, we began our little experiment.
Several hours later, with flour on my face, in my hair, and unfortunately also on my nice cashmere sweater, we had what were supposed to be bat, ghost, and pumpkin shaped cookies, but instead were blobs. Yes, blobs! Somehow inside the oven, these nice little shapes that we had so carefully cut out and laid onto the baking tray morphed into stuck-to-each-other, shapeless thingamies.
Now no self-respecting mother can embarrass her child by sending blob-shaped cookies to school, can she? So M, bless her heart, decided that we must decorate these amorphous shapes so that they at least bore some resemblance to what they were supposed to be, and were not just amoeboid (and sadly burnt) things.
We frantically searched for a recipe for sugar frosting, and after much mixing and tasting we had a mass of sweet, oh, so sweet, orange, (very orange) – stuff. We proceeded to lay on generous helpings of orange goop onto our “cookies”, hoping this might make them look like pumpkins.
They didn’t particularly look like pumpkins, or taste like cookies, but I haven’t had so much fun in a long, long time - almost as much fun as baking mud pies.
2 comments:
Didn't know baking cookies was such an ordeal because occasionally - and I repeat occasionally - I come home to the delicious aroma of baked cookies which Mili seems to find very easy to make. They are really delicious , and although calorie heavy and made for Kyle , they soon disappear down my the hatch with Kyle and Mili looking on. So now she has got into the habit of making two batches - the heavy ones for Kyle which are kept hidden and the diet ones for yours truly .
they're not supposed to be an ordeal :) But with my rusty baking skills and our limited stack of ingredients, it turned into one. It was, however, a lot of fun
Post a Comment