Baking

Baking. Just the word brings to mind a warm oven filled with beautiful breads and the yeasty smell permeating the house while a woman wearing a sylish apron stands (in her spotless kitchen of course) smiling as she ushers her guests into her homemakers paradise.

That woman is NOT me.

I tried my hand at crescent rolls the other day. I was following a very easy recipe from bargainblessings.com (which is one of my favorite sites). It was easy and simple and yet here's a play by play of how the day went:

9 am - I follow all the directions exactly (or so I think) and put the bread dough in a warm spot to rise for an hour.

10:30 am - Hubby is awake, I am cooking something for lunch, so I ask him to help me by adding flour and shaping my newly risen dough. He opens the oven door where its been rising and finds the dough has escaped its bowl and gooped on the bottom of my (foil lined, whew!) oven floor.

10:45 am - Hubby pours the bread on the counter asking me if it should really be so runny. I, busy with other preparation, say "yes, just add a bit of flour." More than a cup or two later, he finally gets the dough in some manageable form, but it's still to soft to shape or cut. The meal I'm working on is ready so I say to just leave it there and I'll finish it later.

11:45 am - Our meal is done and we go back to look at the bread. It still seems a bit soft so we add some more flour then leave it on the counter covered with a towel. I fix husbands lunch, feed baby and work on some other chores. I also write a hurried question about what I might be doing wrong on the bargainblessings site...but then in half an hour take it off b/c I think I may discourage someone else from trying the recipe and worry I sound negative.

1:30 pm - I remember I have that dough sitting on the counter and return to the kitchen. It has doubled in size and is slowly sneaking towards the edge of my counter, almost ready to take a dripping dive onto the floor. I laugh, punch the dough down, add more flour and shape and cut into triangles and make into crescent shape.

1:45 pm - It's 100 degrees out and we have no AC, so it dawns on me that today may not be the best day for baking. Hmmm. So I pull out the toaster oven and bake 6 rolls in there. They come out ok, but still a bit gooey in the center and not very pretty over all. Edible though. I also take some dough and make crescent shapes and put them in the freezer to see if frozen dough works the same when baked.

2:00 pm - I put butter and cinnamon sugar on the other premade crescent triangles and roll up. Put those in toaster oven for a minute or two longer. Baby gets fussy, so I go change diaper & feed. Come back to find rock hard toasted crescents that had continued to bake after the machine turned off. Compost addition # 1.

2:30 pm - I take the rest of the leftover dough and decide it would be good for bread, so I pop it in a bread loaf and put it in the oven for about 18 minutes. After all, the crescents only needed 12 minutes to bake. I check it after 18 minutes and the outside is a nice brown and sounds hollow when I tap it so I think it must be done. I take it out and cut it open and find a beautiful crust for the first inch and goo for the rest. Compost addition #2.

3:00 pm - I clean up the kitchen and think that at least the house smells like fresh baked bread. :)

4:00 pm - I pull two frozen crescents out of the deep freeze and bake them in the toaster oven. These turn out the best of any of them, but I still have my suspicions about what I've done to the dough originally.

Midnight - My husband comes home from work and opens the freezer to get his frozen pizzas out. The tray of frozen crescents is on the top so he takes it out and puts it behind him on the counter and promptly forgets about them.

7:00 am - I come into the kitchen for breakfast and notice the tray of now very un-frozen crescents on the counter. Compost addition #3.

I want to learn to bake...and yet after experiences like this if I didn't have a sense of humor I think I'd stop trying! I posted a bit of this on my facebook page and one of my friends said this,

There will be a day when you are going to be the best known baker and cook around and your kids are going to praise you for it and it'll be one of the very things that your grown kids who are moved out are going to be so excited about coming home to!! The best way to success is the get back in that kitchen after its almost burnt down...lol...you're doing awesome!!

We all need friends like that!!