Between You, Me and the Lamp
Post
Day 24: Not even the birds wanted my cookies
Someone asked me today if one
of my hobbies was cooking and baking. Euh well, I cook dinner every night, but
I would hardly call it a hobby.
Am I a good cook? Well, you would have to ask
my son that. I haven’t poisoned him yet, so that’s a good sign. By no stretch
of the imagination am I competition for Julia Child though, so let’s just say
that I’m an average cook.
As for baking … no, where it
comes to baking I have two left hands. Let me tell you a story, two stories
actually. Long-time readers might be familiar with the stories as they’ve been
published before, but since I have quite a few new subscribers to my blog I’ll
tell the stories again.
I remember the day like it
was
yesterday. My son, Dieter, had his 6th birthday coming up and I was going to make cupcakes for his
party. I got all the ingredients together, mixed the dough, scooped bits of it
into the paper cups and placed the lot in the oven.
“Keep an eye on them will
you, Dieter,” I said. “I’m quickly gonna go and make the beds.”
It didn’t take long before
he called “Ma! The cupcakes are foaming.”
I stuck my head out of one
of the bedrooms. “You mean they are rising? They’re supposed to do that.”
A short while later Dieter
called again. “Ma, those cupcakes are rising really high.”
“How high?” I called back.
“I don’t know,” he said, appearing
in the bedroom doorway. “The oven looks like a washing machine. All foamy.”
Foamy? That didn’t sound
good.
When I went to take a look,
I saw right away that something had gone horribly wrong. The whole oven was
full of foaming dough and it was forcing its way out through the cracks. To cut
a long story short, instead of normal flour I had used self-rising flour with a
good dose of yeast. It took me ages to clean the oven and Dieter got a store-bought
coke for his birthday.
Not one to give up easily, I
decided to try my hand at cookies. Maybe that would work better than cupcakes.
I followed the instructions of the cookbook and paid attention to use the
correct flour this time.
When the time came to eat
the cookies Dieter took a bite and pulled a face.
“What?” I asked him.
“They’re kinda hard,” he
said.
I tried one too and OMG this
wasn’t a cookie, this was a stone and so were the others.
Instead of throwing them in the
bin, I decided to feed them to the birds. Imagine my surprise when a couple of
pigeons showed up, briefly pecked at the cookies and took off again. Not even the birds wanted my cookies!
Oh well, I could always feed
them to the ducks.
“Are you sure that’s a good
idea?” my ex said. “The ducks might sink.”
The years passed and I met
someone who gave me the recipe for focaccia bread. I tried it and it came out
beautiful. I tried another kind of bread and while the result was not exactly
perfect, it was edible.
Something I make really
well though if I say so myself, is ‘Aalsterse vlaaien’. It’s not bread and it’s not a
cake, it’s a type of flan, but solid.
Just about every woman in Aalst, Belgium,
knows how to make it and being from Aalst, I too pride myself that I can make
it too.
