I have been doing quite a bit of experimentation with baking over the past couple of years. Since retiring from the glamorous life of writing tickets, running after people I have no hope of catching, and cleaning vomit out of the back of my patrol car, I have had to find something new to do with all of my free time. And, fortunately, immolating pastries beyond the ability of normal people to eat them has filled the need nicely.
Before your eyes glaze over and you start browsing for something else to read, I want to assure you that I am not going to start posting my favorite recipes every week. This isn’t that kind of blog. If you don’t know how to bake cookies or cobble together an apple pie, you sure as hell aren’t going to gain those skills from anything I have to say. Besides, most of my recipes you can find just as easily by typing “pie” into your favorite search engine and browsing the results. I’m not claiming to have any magic rolodex full of secret baking delicacies handed down for generations through my family.
Well, there is that pineapple upside-down cake recipe my mom used to make, but dear lord that thing was awful. If you want the recipe so you can torture someone who has deeply wronged you in some way, write me an e-mail and I’ll send you a copy.
Years ago, I started teaching myself to bake by making simple things like cookies from premade cookie dough. I followed such difficult directions as: “Cut, place on baking sheet, put in oven.” Somehow, I still managed to make most of the stuff I cooked inedible. Usually, unplanned fires were involved.
I kept at it, graduating from ruining cookies to utterly destroying cakes, pies and other more advanced goodies.
Then one day, quite by accident, I actually baked something good. For my youngest daughter’s birthday, I made a rainbow checkerboard cake. The cake was a mix from a box, and the checkerboard pattern was about as difficult to assemble as a 6-piece jigsaw puzzle, but I’m still calling this one a win. My daughter loved the cake.
More recently, I decided to attempt some stupidly difficult recipes. Mostly because I was bored and the voices in my head had started making suggestions about crawling through the attic of the house and rewiring the lights. I know less about electricity than I do about baking, and I’m relatively certain there haven’t been a lot of people killed or maimed in terrible baking accidents.
I tried to make macarons a few weeks ago. They were lumpy, an odd color, and the filling looked like paste, but what they lacked in looks they more than made up for by tasting absolutely terrible. I ran a couple more batches, and each round was a slight improvement over the last. I figure within the next three hundred years I should get pretty good at it.
It hasn’t all been disasters. Most of them, certainly, but not all. Along with my baking hobby, I have also gotten into gardening. The past few summers, I have grown sugar pumpkins in the garden and used them to bake up an assortment of cookies, cupcakes, and pies. I grow the pumpkins, bake them and puree the pulp, then freeze the puree to use during the rest of the year. As I bake, I thaw out what I need and use it in various recipes. And, to everyone’s shock, they have been downright tasty.
Just in the last week, my youngest daughter told me one of her college classes was doing a potluck. She asked if I would be willing to bake three or four dozen pumpkin cookies and bring them to her. Because I’m such a good dad (and because what the hell else do I have to do all day) I agreed. I spent half a day on Monday baking cookies, then another half day driving to her dorm room to drop them off.
My oldest, during the same week, asked if I would teach her how to make a pumpkin pie. She wants to bake one for her roommates at school and wanted me to show her how. She said she wants to do it from scratch, which means she wants me to bake, puree and freeze several pumpkins for her, teach her to make a pie crust, then show her how to make a filling. She told me she really likes the pies I make, and she wants hers to be exactly the same.
While this is flattering, especially after so many years of baking things that lasted just long enough to sit on the counter and cool down before being thrown in the trash, it is also a lot of work I hadn’t planned on. I started baking as a hobby to entertain myself and to occasionally create something to snack on while watching horror movies on television. I didn’t think I would ever get good enough that people would want me to start baking treats on demand. That wasn’t supposed to be part of the deal.
I think my only option is to start burning things again. I need the word to get out that nothing that comes out of my oven is worth putting in your mouth. Maybe then my kids will remember why they never used to ask me for anything and I can get back to spending time on the couch munching on homemade charcoal chip cookies.
Or, maybe I should just dig out my mom’s old pineapple upside-down cake recipe. No. Even for me, that’s going too far.