Note to Self: When beginning new baking projects please refer to old blog entries that will remind you to pick up cake at bakery. Thank you.


December 11, 2003 (archive from my old LiveJournal account)

01:43 pm - Embrace your Mistakes

I suck at baking. It’s fine, don’t try to make me feel better about it. I know I suck, and I’m ok with that. There are many things I’m bad at (AND many things I’m good at, but it’s not about that today) like painting, singing, converting baking measurements, cutting a straight line, and acting.

I’ve tried all of those many times and I’ve come to the realization that in order to confront your weaknesses you must embrace them. (Except for last year when a friend was the best man in a wedding and after the toast wanted me to be honest in evaluating it. It WAS pretty bad and I said so in a very nice way but that was obviously not what he was looking for - so I am sticking to being honest with myself)

As I mentioned, I am a horrible artist. But I love to be crafty. So I continue to go to those paint-your-own-pottery places with friends because it’s fun to sit and do something artistic while socializing. I can now find it relaxing – where it used to really upset me. You go in with high hopes of going home with a beautiful piece of functional art that you’ve created, you envision it on your wall or table and people stopping stare at it and commenting “You MUST tell me who did that, it’s exquisite!” And if you’re me, you always go home disappointed and frustrated that you spent $40 on a piece of crap you wouldn’t even put in a cupboard. But not anymore. I’ve made a mental change. I now proudly look at the light switch that took me two hours to make last week and even though Jackson’s name is crooked and the stars look like globs, I know I had fun doing it.

I’m however, not having fun with baking. Two days – 10 hours later my cookies look like a five year old made them. It shouldn’t have been hard – it’s premixed sugar cookie dough – but yet it was. The snowflakes are misshapen due to uneven levels of dough in the rolling out process, some are a little more “done” than others, the icing hasn’t harden and it’s been 12 hours, the gel apparently never will, the silver balls were marked “inedible” even though they were in the baking section, and I have no idea how to transport 70 cookies the size of my hand to the cookie exchange tomorrow. The cookies I saw in my head are definitely nothing like the ones sitting in my kitchen.

But they’re edible, what can I say?