Einstein defined insanity as, “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results”.
After a recent experience, that is a rather disheartening sentence for me to read.
You may not be aware of the fact, Reader, but I am an avid baker. My skills as a cook are terrible – nearly every time I am tasked with preparing dinner for my family my older sister voices the complaint that her meal is either completely lacking in flavor or much too salty. Normally, I would attribute her impertinence to amiable teasing, but as I too am made to eat the food I prepare, I can confirm she rarely errs in her appraisals of my abilities.
However, though I am incompentent when asked to saute, I reign supreme in the sphere of baking. After years of begging my mother to throw out boxed mixes in favor of letting me try my hand at whipping up from-scratch treats, I have finally reached a place of comfort in the kitchen among baking pans and cooking sprays. This journey was not an easy one, but was fraught with enormous messes, lackluster creations, a great many failed “experiments,” and much dismay as I struggled to understand why my pursuits were rarely successful. I knew my mother’s patience was wearing thin, and that but for her kind-hearted desire to encourage my hobbies I would have been banned from the kitchen long, long ago. My career as a baker was on treacherously thin ice. With great defeat, I made the necessary return to the basics. I stopped getting “creative” with ingredients and testing out techniques I had seen employed on Cupcake Wars and Cake Boss. I began reading the instructions with care (it is amazing how much I progressed once I stopped merely skimming recipe pages). And slowly, miraculously, my baking improved. My confections became lovely treats of which I could not make enough. With just a little organization, my family’s faith in my abilities was reinstated and I was allowed to bury myself in clouds of confectioner’s sugar nearly whenever I pleased.
Yet. As with anything I do, even in the midst of success there exists some sense of chaos, the underlying idea to which we are all privy that even when consistently achieving the desired outcome I never seem to be able to cleanly hit the target. There is always something – even when absolutely nothing goes wrong… something does. Therefore, I suppose no one was surprised when I nearly blew up my oven twice in one week.
I was deep in a baking frenzy, having spent hours in the kitchen every day for nearly a week, when I decided to whip up a Vanilla Bundt Cake with Chocolate Cream-Cheese Filling and two Lemon Pound Cake loaves in the same afternoon. No insurmountable task, but I knew the act would require great speed and precision if I was to serve my family treats delectable enough to avoid the exasperated glare of my mother when she discovered I would be making twice as many goods as normal, and dominating her kitchen for far longer than was my turn.
Ah, Reader. I take absolutely no responsibility for the subsequent disaster and blame what happened on three great entities: baking powder, salt, and Martha Stewart.
Now, when instructing to use one and a half units of an ingredient, most recipes use a hyphen in between the one and half (like so: 1-½), or employ a decimal (like so: 1.5). However, Ms. Stewart elected not to include either of these humble annotations in her recipe, and instead wrote out one and a half like so: 1 ½.
Reader, you may be asking why the above information is relevant. If you will read on, I am sure you will discover why the correct interpretation of the ingredients list makes all the difference in the world.
Instead of 1 ½ units, I read those fateful numbers as 11/2… which is the equivalent of five and a half units. Did I find it very odd Ms. Stewart would command me to measure out so much baking soda for her bundt cake? Absolutely. But I am not of the mind to question anything recommended by Martha, and committed myself to following the recipe exactly – five and a half teaspoons of baking powder and all (although in retrospect, given the lady’s sticky history with numbers, perhaps I really should have given more thought to the matter).
I had a nagging feeling as I put the watery bundt cake in the oven, but I shook it off, cleaned my tools, and prepared to get to work on the lemon loaves… until the burning smell made me stop.
I opened the oven, and lo and behold my precious bundt cake was exploding. Erupting. Detonating from the chemical bomb that was five and half teaspoons of baking powder. Gooey clumps were charred black as they stuck to the frame of the oven, and I watched in horror as the top of the cake continued to blister brown, then slide over the side of the tin onto the metal racks.
I closed the door and went back to my lemon loaves.
But something stopped me before I could get very far. An inkling premonition warned me not to begin another baking project when my first was quite literally all over the oven interior, and mercifully I took my own advice (for perhaps the first time in history) and put away the flour, sugar, bowls… and wretched baking soda.
To no one’s surprise, the situation worsened. Unbaked ooze was now sliding out from the bottom of the oven door and sticking in globs to the floor, where my dog was all too happy to lick them up. The pungent smell of charred sugar filled the air, and it was all I could do to pray my older sister would stay in her room until I could handle the situation. Older sisters, for those who are unaware, often assume the role of self-appointed parent, which I did not need at that moment.
Have I mentioned I am a dreamer? I have big dreams – being an actress, making powerful art, living a great story – but I think to truly be an artist there is some element of delirium required. Who else but the slightly-delusional would willingly march with a wild smile on their faces into a lifetime of rejection, pain, and doubt… with the confidence that tomorrow will be the day everything changes? That terrible, wonderful, awful day, I genuinely believed my bundt cake would set if only given time, that it was a surplus of chocolate filling that made the delicious creation combust, that everything would sort itself out and I would serve to my family the most divine bundt cake they had ever tried in mere hours.
As I have discovered over and over again but never seem to remember: deams, big or small, are very rarely grounded in reality.
When the oven timer rang, I pulled the partially-liquid, partially-globbed, slightly-crisp-on-the-rim cake out of the oven. It was a panic-inducing scene: more cake was inside the oven than was left in the pan, the oven door was coated in a gelatin-like substance, and my dog was wildly trying to slip past me to devour the disaster.
While I was adamant I had done nothing wrong, this was my mess to clean. And I did. Sort of. Until my mother came home, sighed, and told me to stop touching anything and please order in for dinner.
It was rather disheartening, and of course what made me most furious was the suspicion that I was rapidly losing any ground I had regained over the past years in regards to my baking abilities. I feared cumulations of perfectly-executed cupcakes all would all be forgotten in this one terrible incident, and I would be forced to rebuild my family’s culinary trust from square one. Irate, defensive, and in a heated state of overreaction, I vowed to try again the next day.
And try again I did. Only on this bright and sunny afternoon, I began with the lemon loaves. Easy-peasy, nothing to fear. I would redeem myself. I measured out the ingredients, flying through the recipe like a professional.
11/2 teaspoons of salt. I frowned. That seemed like a lot of salt, but I remembered the bundt cake recipe from yesterday had used the same annotation. Dumping into my mixture a horrific amount of salt, I shrugged and assumed Martha was partial to using the large fraction to indicate five and a half units.
This was my legitimate thought process. I know.
I finished the lemon loaves and popped them in the oven. Perfect. Now, to tackle the beast.
I walked through the first steps of making the bundt cake, going very slowly, checking myself over and over as I went along. Whisk together flour, baking powder and salt. How much baking powder again? I checked the ingredient list. Ah, yes. One and a half teaspoons. Easy.
I froze.
For a brief moment, everything went black. Then, the world exploded in a kaleidoscope of indistinct shapes colored more brightly than the sun. With every roaring beat, my heart slid further and further down into my body.
Now I was angry. I was upset. I was raging. I nearly screamed. I did growl.
In a torrent of malice, I finished the bundt cake and poured it into its pan. The lemon loaves came out of the oven. To no one’s surprise a single bite made me gag and my eyes water – they were grainy bricks of pure salt.
My mother and sister came home, took one look at my bright-red, scrunched face, and quietly fled the scene. I tackled my cleaning, reset my space, and remade the lemon loaves for the second time. I was not going to be defeated by a Martha Stewart cake recipe – or by those devious horrors we call “fractions”. Not today, not ever.
And, Reader, the second round of cakes were lovely! The bundt cake was perfectly sweet, the lemon loaves comforting and bursting with the flavors of spring. It is amazing what happens when we let chemistry work the way it was intended, is it not? My family ate bundt and lemon pound cakes for days. It was delightful. Almost so delightful, the entire ordeal was forgotten. But not quite. When I resolved to make cookies a few days later, I could have sworn I saw a flicker of fear in my sister’s eyes when she saw me preheating the oven.
What is the point in recounting this tale? I am not sure. Perhaps the takeaway is that we should not take ourselves too seriously, perhaps it is to remember that failure is an inevitable aspect of life, even when we are doing what we love. Perhaps it is to read an ingredient list correctly. Or perhaps, this is merely a ridiculous story intended to amuse. At any rate, I hope the anecdote of my disastrous baking exploits made you smile, and that when you inevitably attempt to execute one of Martha’s cake recipes for yourself, that you remember your first grade maths skills and create a minimal mess in your kitchen. And if such an occurrence is unavoidable, that at least you are able to laugh it off and try again. Happy baking!
Love,
Lettie Anne
Photo from Heather Scott Home on Pinterest.