I rarely do baking posts. I’ve done one in fact: a chocolate chip birthday cake. And it was good. The cake, and I guess the post because it’s the most read posts on my blog.
Because I’m not really much of a baker.
For obvious reasons, I don’t want to yell out, “hey, look at me, I’m so similar to Rachael Ray!” I don’t run a multi-million dollar media empire, I don’t know anything about the Adirondacks, and I hate terms like spoonula. But we do share one thing in common: we don’t bake. Let me modify: I rarely bake, although for specific occasions, like birthdays and the holidays, I’ve been known to break out a bundt pan.
While I love the smells and imperfect nature of cooking, it’s for those very two reasons that I don’t care for baking. I hate the precise measurements. It bothers me that I can’t taste the final product until it comes out of the oven. And most of all, the smell makes me nauseous. Call me crazy. It’s not too bad when it’s in the oven. But it’s that scent of raw flour/eggs/sugar that puts me off. That ice cream craze with all kinds of raw mix-ins like cookie dough and brownie batter? If I see someone eating that stuff it will trigger my gag reflex. I sometimes lie about things on my blog. I’m not lying. I will literally start gagging.
Even more shocking are the people who admit that they’ll eat through an entire log of cookie dough in one sitting. I would rather eat uni. Or eel. Or the two other foods that I can’t stand and I conveniently can’t name. Old age does that to you.
So I don’t like to bake too much.
Lauren is getting into baking. She likes to help, she likes to stir. Thank God for her raw egg allergy because she’s 100% not allowed to eat the batter. Not that she’d want to – she thinks it’s nauseating too. A girl after my own heart.
Lauren loves baking so much that one of her favorite iPad apps is Cookie Doodle. She has so much fun mixing the ingredients, rolling the dough, cutting out the shapes, decorating the cookies with sprinkles and heart-shaped candies.
“What are you up to?” I said the other day when I saw her shaking the iPad up and down (while supposedly reading ABC Mouse). I had clearly busted her in the throws of an unsanctioned Cookie Doodle mission. And I knew that move well – you have to shake the pinch of salt into the bowl.
She admitted that she’d gone into Cookie Doodle, but was so proud of the cookies she’d just made. “Mom, can I show you?” she looked up at me beaming.
I looked down and saw this:
