Baking: Love/Hate {Part One}

Let me share a little secret with you. I kinda hate baking. I mean you can’t fully hate baking because when you bake, baked goods come out of the oven and they are delicious. So the story always ends happily. Except it doesn’t really… it’s a faux happy ending.

This is how baking really works: you get out a bunch of ingredients that spill all over your floor and counter {sugar, flour, etc.}, you measure them all precisely according to a recipe {no creativity}, and then you put the mixed ingredients in the oven. Did I mention the risk of baking – that if you aren’t paying close enough attention and accidentally forget or add too much of one ingredient all your work in ruined? Anyway, back to the baking process. You have to keep your eye on the oven, since all ovens cook differently, to make sure you don’t undercook or overcook these baked goods. 

Then comes the good part if you succeed in all of the above…. fresh and warm baked goods straight from the oven! The bad part is that baked goods only really taste great the first 24-48 hours, so the goal, at least in my opinion, is to eat as many as you possibly can in that first day or two. And this is where the faux happy ending comes into play – eating, I don’t know… say, two dozen cookies, half a cake, or one whole loaf of bread in a two day span is simply not good for you, anyway you look at it. I don’t care if you used applesauce instead of oil. It’s not healthy. {P.S. I do NOT believe in using applesauce instead of oil, spelt instead of flour, or Splenda instead of sugar. If you are going to make a treat, you need to MAKE a treat. Butter, oil, sugar, white fluffy flour. Bring it. Don’t skimp. Just don’t do it very often.} And that, my friends, is why I don’t like baking.  I love the fluffy, sugary goodness that comes out of the oven, but the process… the flour-dusted counters, babysitting the oven, the desire to consume three times my daily calorie needs in bread and cookies makes me kinda hate it.

With all that said, I will be back tomorrow with two new recipes because I sucked it up and baked TWICE this past week. And now I’m sucking it in because of that 3,000 calorie factor…