Lately I’ve had these urges to bake, and at really late at night. Its really pretty ridiculous and totally inconvenient. But I HAVE TO BAKE! I didn’t even bake this much when I still lived at mom’s. I would get the urge like once a year. But in the past week I’ve made (and in this order): Cornbread from a box, sugar cookies, cornbread from semi-scratch, and brownies. Guess which one is pictured above.
I think the cornbread from the box (Trader Joe’s version) was so delicious and so easy, that it gave me this super false sense of super-hero baker and I was all THIS AIN’T HARD! I can do this, no sweat! But I made sugar cookies shortly after that (really since we didn’t have any other ingredients to make anything else) and they came out GREAT for the first 1/2 hour, and then after that they swayed to biscuit status and all they were missing was some gravy (per the other residents in the house). Then a friend came over and after politely choking one down referred to them as “snickerdoodles”. I really don’t know the difference, but this I DO know, that if you make something and someone calls it something else, you probably didn’t execute it all that well. Can you imagine making a great pot roast and someones all “Great chicken dip!”. Something obviously went awry. Even though I’m still not sure what. However, in retaliation, I thought hold up - I make a FANTASTIC cornbread. And pasta with sauce has been frequenting our dinner table lately, so I decided to make it again. Unfortunately this was another semi-fail, because although Mike was nice enough to eat half of the whole thing, it just wasn’t sweet like the Trader Joe’s kind and frankly, kind of nasty. So another fail there.
So what does a wannabe Top Chef do?! I’m just trying to bake with success. I remembered a friend of mine raved about some brownies I made in a jar for Christmas last year, the kind you put together and all they have to do is add water or something and bam! Brownies! So I dragged Mike to CVS, after debating that it WAS a necessary purchase and only after agreeing to buy another fish for the fish tank (since two unnecessary purchases equal a necessary one, duh), and voila! threw together the mix and threw them in the oven and wow… the brownies turned out AWESOME. I guess you can’t really go wrong with white and dark chocolate chips in brown sugar and cocoa mix, but it was the perfect potion to get my baking self-efficacy back up to the levels it should be… and also a new secret weapon for the next potluck they have at the office. Because they have approxiamtely 16 of those a week.
