I am Martha Stewart’s worst nightmare. That is especially sad considering she’s set as my homepage. I used to look forward to doing my Christmas baking until I screwed it up so many times that I realized I mess up more recipes than I actually finish. That little fact only took me seven years to figure out.
I’ve been feeling an unusual propulsion AWAY from the kitchen this holiday season. With all I’ve got going on in my life, I’ve just been in no mood to join the holiday baking frenzy. I have yet to make my traditional pumpkin bread, a family favorite that I usually bake several batches of well before Thanksgiving. Perhaps it has something to do with the pumpkin pound cake it turned out to be last year. Some of you might remember that story. I also wore myself out recently baking and icing cute little school bus cookies for Will’s class the first day of preschool. They turned out darling, but along the way I was cursing the day I bought icing ingredients.
Cookies in magazines always look so easy to make. And maybe for some people they are. But for me, a woman who is as challenged in the kitchen as on the sports field, baking cookies is a formidable task. So I really hadn’t planned to do much baking this year. It doesn’t help that I have a two-year-old Taz with pigtails under my feet (or on the counter top). But something possessed me to get in the kitchen for holiday baking, as it usually does this time of year, and I found myself once-again elbow-deep in another cooking disaster.
I had honestly contemplated not buying another electric mixer when I broke the other one by sticking a knife in it while it was turning last month. (What a potentially horrible situation that was!) Then I wouldn’t be tempted to fall prey to such kitchen woes. But my sweet children started asking for Gingerbread men when they spotted those cute little Gingerbread Family cookie cutters from Crate & Barrel hiding back in the cabinet. (Thanks, MOM!) I shook my head all the way to Wal-mart where I purchased a new mixer so that I could stir up a big mess in my kitchen.
We started the afternoon with the WHOLE family in the kitchen to all take turns dipping spices and flinging them across the mixing bowl. Thank goodness we started during Bill’s lunch break. He got to handle Hunter (who really needs two armed guards) while I measured and instructed. After the flour, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, ginger and cloves were all thoroughly whisked together, Bill escorted her off the premises to wash up and lay down for a nap. Did you catch that? Baking powder? It was only AFTER Will and I finished preparing the rest of the ingredients so that we could break out the brand new evil mixer and put it to work that I realized the recipe called for baking SODA. I’m so used to the baking powder for pancakes and what-not that I completely mis-read the recipe. So out came the trash can, where we dumped over four cups of dry ingredients and started the process all over again.
I only wish that had been the last mistake of the afternoon. The next one came from an inability to judge the thickness of dough. I am so literal that the thought actually crossed my mind that I should pull out a ruler to see just how thick the dough was when I rolled it out. The normal part of my brain said, “Shut up and just cook the stupid things.” So I did. After wrestling gingerbread people off of the counter top, onto the stone and smushing umpteen arms, legs, tails, and chimneys back on my gingerbread family, I decided the dough was way too thin. Making cookies should NOT be this difficult. I rolled it all up and started over. Apparently there was a reason I had chilled the dough for an hour. After rolling and re-rolling the dough, the gingerbread men weren’t even thinking about coming off that pan.
So I, by this time an excellent and very quick dough-roller-outer, pulled out the other half of dough from the fridge, slapped it down to exactly 1/4 inch thick, stamp-stamp-stamped those cookie cutters, and voila! I had me a gingerbread family to bake! It seemed so easy!
Until it was time to pull them out of the oven. The recipe said to be careful not to brown them. What the crap? The boogers were brown when I stuck them IN THE OVEN. I just went with the 9 minutes and assumed the 11 would be too brown. I like to err on the safe side. But there ain’t nuthin’ safe about not getting cooked enough when you’re a gingerbread kid! Even after I thought they were ready to come off the pan, and carefully with a spatula, I had no more than 4 good cookies out of the batch. The recipe said it would make 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 dozen gingerbread cookies. My foot! It made 2 1/2 dozen gingerbread body parts!!
I don’t know what my problem is really. But thinking back through all of my cooking catastrophes, they all have one thing in common–completely stupid mistakes! I just don’t have enough sense to be in the kitchen. If only I could learn my lesson and never step foot in there again!
