Tag: baking

Baking Like a Grownup

My daughters don’t like when I treat them like children. They want me to see them as partners in our home, with an equal say in all decisions that affect them.  As fully grown, legally recognized adults, my children are trying to assert their independence.

By “independence” I mean they still want free housing, free food, clothing, entertainment, a car with full insurance provided, phones, no required house chores, yard chores, or responsibilities, they want their privacy respected while maintaining open access for themselves to all parts of the house at any time, and they have the nerve to expect….

I think I’m getting a little derailed here. What was I talking about?

Oh, right. Independence. The girls want the freedom to come and go as they please, and to treat dad like a painted backdrop in a high school play.

Anyone reading this blog already knows that I have clearly failed as a father. It’s too late to change their behaviors now. They will continue to live their lives right under our noses while at the same time pretending they have no parents. I know this is true because, for the most part, this is exactly how I treated my parents at the same age. I’m not proud of it, but I am acknowledging that lousy kids raise lousy kids.

Since I am desperate for attention because both of my children see me as little more than an extension of the furniture, it should come as no surprise that a couple weeks ago, when EM1 asked me if I would teach her how to bake homemade cookies, I jumped at the chance to interact with my child as something other than a bank ATM.

EM1 really likes a pumpkin spice cookie recipe that I found a few years ago. She wanted to know if I had enough fresh pumpkin from the garden to make some with her and teach her how to do them for herself. I said I did, and of course I would show her how.

On the Friday we agreed upon, I began pulling out pans and ingredients. I asked EM1 how many she wanted to make. She paused a moment, then told me that six dozen should be enough, but we should probably make a few extra in case some of them were bad.

Surprised, I asked her why she wanted to make so many. That was when she told me, “My pastor asked if people could bake some homemade goods and bring them to distribute to the church families since we haven’t been able to do group services. I told him that you could make cookies for everyone.”

Yup. My lovely daughter volunteered me to bake six dozen cookies for her church before she even thought to ask me. And because I was so starved for affection from my own kids, I dove headfirst right into her devious little plan. I wasn’t happy about her suckering me into what felt like a middle-school bake sale, where the teachers rope parents into helping by making the kids agree to it before mom and dad know it’s even coming.

EM1 defended herself by saying, “But I told them you make really good cookies.”

Which wasn’t really the point of my complaint, but I still enjoyed the compliment. Hey, I’m human.

I spent the next five hours measuring, sifting, stirring, mixing, shaping, baking and bagging pumpkin spice cookies. I made sure that EM1 did most of the grunt work. I figured this was her idea, so she didn’t get to sit on the couch eating test batches while I did the cooking. To my surprise, she actually did a pretty good job once we got the assembly line rolling. She was baking like a real grownup.

About halfway through the whole baking process, EM2 wandered into the kitchen, grabbed a cookie without asking, then asked, “Why are you baking with her? How come you never do this with me?”

I told her to grab an apron and a spoon, but she shook her head. “I don’t want to help, I want us to make Halloween cookies and decorate them, just the two of us. Hey! We should do that tomorrow!”

I told her I didn’t really want to spend another entire day of my weekend baking.

She said, “Okay. We’ll do Halloween cookies tomorrow.” Then she grabbed another pumpkin cookie from the cooling rack and disappeared.

Because I am … well, me, I spent all day Saturday making Halloween sugar cookies with EM2. In order to make sure I was being fair, EM2 insisted that we couldn’t just make a dozen or so cookies. Her sister got to make six dozen cookies, so I had to make six dozen more with her.

As I have demonstrated time and again, I have no real backbone to speak of, so once more, I spent my day measuring, sifting, stirring, etc. Only this time it took even longer since we had to make frosting and decorate each cookie after it was baked.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, it’s because I am. But I acknowledge that for two entire days, I was relevant to my kids. Maybe even important. Perhaps that was only because EM1 devised a devious plan to obtain baked goods, and EM2 was too jealous to see EM1 do anything that she couldn’t do as well, but I’ll take it. Sometimes even the worst intentions can result in something positive.

I spent time with my kids.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with all these damn cookies in the house.

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By Special Request

For EM1’s birthday this year, she made a special request. She did not want a birthday cake like every other year of her life. This time, she wanted me to make Macarons.

“No sweat. Happy to do it,” I told her.

My initial thought was that Macarons are like fussy cookies. I have baked lots of cookies in my day, so this should be a piece of cake (if you’ll pardon the pun). After a little bit of research, I was quickly dissuaded of the idea that the little French sweets were anything like cookies. They are nothing like cookies. They may be flat and round, but the tricky bastards are only camouflaging themselves like an innocent cookie when in reality they are evil and do not belong in a normal human being’s kitchen.

Okay, maybe not actually evil, but the rest of my opinion stands.

My second thought was, instead of making them, I’ll just go out and buy some. It’ll be easier and I’ll just tell EM1 that I made them. Problem solved.

Until I started looking at prices.

Have you ever bought a Macaron? They are quite a bit more expensive than I expected, and since I had no desire to mortgage the house just to buy cookies (sorry … not cookies) I was back to square one. Only, I was actually further back than square one, since I now realized that this project might take a little more time and effort than I had originally planned.

Turned out, I was wrong about that assumption as well.

It took A LOT more time and effort than I originally planned.

I found a recipe online called “Basic French Macarons – perfect for beginners.” There are so many oxymorons in that statement I don’t even know where to start. The word “basic” should be nowhere in that sentence, and “perfect for beginners” is so misleading the author should be sued for libel.

There were only seven ingredients in the recipe, so in the beginning I thought I had a chance of creating something edible. The world is so full of horrible things that I should know better by now than to ever hope something will turn out the way it was promised. For such a small list of ingredients, there was an inordinate amount of sifting, separating, whisking, whipping, and folding.

I know what those words usually mean, but when applying them to baking I’m a little lost. In general, if I can’t do it with a bowl and a spoon, it just ain’t happening.

I suppose it might have helped if I had read the instructions the day before and had some idea of what I was doing before I started. The recipe called for room temperature butter and eggs. I keep both those items in the refrigerator, so the first step of making Macarons for me was “set butter and eggs on counter and go watch an hour of Netflix.”

That was the part of the baking experience that worked out okay. I had time to start season 5 of American Horror Story. Score one for the Chef!

Next, I pre-heated the oven and mixed my Macaron ingredients into the mixing bowl. The mixture came out like a lumpy green oatmeal. I am pretty sure that is not the desired texture, however I was not about wait another hour while I brought two more eggs up to room temperature. I was committed and already stuck in enemy territory.

I placed the oddly rigid mass into a piping bag and squirted out two dozen circles of batter on two baking sheets. Okay, if I’m being honest, I piped out two dozen ovals, triangles, and various blobs. You would think circles would be easy.

And you would be very, very wrong.

I read the next line in the recipe and it said, “let the Macarons sit out on the counter for up to a couple hours, until batter becomes stiff and rubbery.”

Crap.

I turned the oven back off and sat down to watch episode two of season five of American Horror Story. Baking had become an awful lot like binge watching television.

When the batter was ready, I turned the oven back on, waited for it to heat up (while watching more TV), then popped the first of the baking sheets in to cook for the recommended 17 to 20 minutes.

After which, I sat back down on the couch to finish watching episode 3.

Twenty-five minutes later, I pulled out my dark brown, crumbling Macarons from the smoking oven.

Cookie sheet number two went in, and this time, I paid more attention to the time. At the end of 17 minutes, I pulled out the oddly shaped, but properly baked, lumps of batter.

As they cooled, I made the filling. This turned out to be pretty straight forward. Butter, powdered sugar, and vanilla. Even I didn’t screw up that combination.

By the time I was finished baking EM1’s requested birthday treat, I had a plate with seven incredibly sad looking Macarons. But they were homemade, as promised, and they looked almost edible. Of course, I couldn’t try them out myself since there weren’t enough survivors for sampling. I can only hope they tasted better than they looked.

They probably didn’t.

It was a lot of work and I admit that initially I was a little bothered by EM1’s odd request for a birthday dessert. A cake would have been much easier and cheaper, not to mention I could have made it in half the time it took to make the Macarons.

I’m not mad at her, though. With only seven Macarons on the plate, EM1 ate them all on her own.

And I think that is punishment enough for anybody.

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Enjoying Deep Dark Thoughts? Follow me on Facebook so you don’t miss a post. Just go to my page and click the “Like” button to receive updates on my blog and other projects.

And you can follow me on Twitter @gallenwilbanks.