I like to bake.
I don’t often blog about it because I like blogging about knitting and yarn more. Not that there haven’t been bloggable things that have happened while baking.
There was that time with the banana bread. I was walking across the kitchen with a warm loaf pan just out of the oven, holding it with a kitchen towel, when it slipped out of my hand. Miraculously (and thanks in part to a well greased loaf pan) the bread actually left the pan and floated through the air before I somehow managed to catch the entire loaf back in the pan unharmed. The pan (and I) landed on the floor as if nothing had happened. If Jerry hadn’t witnessed the maneuver I would swear myself that I imagined it. We laughed and laughed about The Amazing Flying Banana Loaf!!
Then there was the time I made a cardamom cake from an old mailorder for the first time. I’ve since learned to either halve the recipe or at least use two loaf pans. That first time I made it, boy, everything went wrong. I had to put a sheet pan under the tube pan during cooking because the batter was spewing over the edge to the bottom of the oven. Not only that, but when I went to remove the cake from the pan (after the requisite cooling time) the whole thing collapsed because I hadn’t cooked it enough. I turned the oven back on and put the cake back in! It was a huge disaster. A yummy disaster, but still.
Earlier this week, I made a practice batch of cupcakes for Jerry’s birthday tomorrow. I don’t know why, but I’ve got pretty bad luck with cupcakes. Of course, the practice batch came out undercooked. I figured my biggest fault was that I had over-filled the cups. So today when I made the for-real batch of chocolate cupcakes, I filled the cups much less than earlier in the week. Everything was going so well!
Since I had made two pans of cupcakes, I was directed by my cookbook to rotate the pans halfway through the baking time. After 10 minutes in the oven (they were looking good! yipee!) I pulled out one pan, set it on the door of the oven, moved the other pan to the top rack, and…I watched the pan that was sitting on the oven door slide slowly to the floor.
I had to laugh. And then I thought of the blog and ran to get my camera.
Cupcakes are supposed to be easy! It’s like some sort of cupcake curse around here - Scooby Doo and the Curse of the Undercooked Cupcakes. I love that black and white, scene-of-the-crime photo above, but here’s what it really looked like.
In the end, everything worked out okay. I had to make a whole second batch of cupcakes but I had all the ingredients on hand. And for the record - half-baked cupcake batter is mega-super-yummy. I did not eat it off the floor.
The best news is that Jerry will have his cupcakes to share with his classmates tomorrow. He’s gonna be 6!











































