But I don’t bake.
Baking is too unforgiving, requiring precise measurements and exact ingredients. If your Bolognese sauce isn’t quite right, you can always add a little bit of garlic or a touch more tomato sauce; if your angel food cake is falling, there’s not much you can do about it, no matter how much garlic you add.
The other day, though, I developed a craving for homemade chocolate chip cookies.
Cookies are basically foolproof, although one of my kids nearly flunked home ec when he confused baking soda with baking powder and made cookies that turned out thin enough to see through.
So I preheat the oven to 375 degrees and carefully follow the recipe on the bag of chocolate morsels, using precisely the right amounts of exactly the right ingredients. When they’re all mixed, I spoon dabs onto the cookie sheet and slide it into the oven. In 9 to 11 minutes, the bag says, they should be golden brown.
Nine minutes later I check them. They are not golden brown. They are the color I am at the end of a long Ohio winter. And they’re longer dabs. They have oozed across the tray and some of them have fused together.
As I am pulling the tray of conjoined cookie ooze from the oven, I notice a green message flashing on the oven’s digital control panel. “Door locked . . .door locked . . . door locked.”
I check the oven door, which is not locked. I jiggle the lever on the door and the message goes away. And so, I realize, has the heat in the oven.
I push the controls on the oven’s touch pad, but nothing happens. Touch pads can be tricky. Sometimes you have to touch them really, really hard. With your fist.
Eventually the oven turns on and I slide the cookie ooze back in. A few minutes later the oven shuts down again. I jiggle the lever, sucker punch the controls and the oven comes back on. And then goes off.
This game goes on for approximately an hour and the ooze is just as pale as the day it was born. So I admit defeat, throw it away and rip open a bag of Oreos.
On the positive side, though, I may have invented a new dish —chocolate chip soup.
Contact D.L. Stewart at dlstew_2000@yahoo.com.
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