Response from a Friend to "The Mystery of Cooking"

I received this email today from a good friend, also a new college grad, also having some difficulty. It made me laugh and cheered me up, so I share it with you. 


"Baking" 
Dear Sarah,

It is funny that I read your blog post today about baking because my roommate and I tried to bake apple bread tonight. Let me just say, solidarity sister! Usually I am pretty good with recipes, except for the one time I burned Easy Mac in the microwave. Pathetic, right? Well, I didn't read the recipe for apple bread all the way through so failed to miss that we were supposed to use two pans. We put ALL the batter into one pan. (In hindsight we should have put half in, baked it, then baked the other half since we only have one bread pan).

It was quite the disaster. See picture 1. We removed some of the batter and tried again, which did not work at all and led to picture 2.

Then our fire alarm went off.

On the bright side, it tasted really good despite the mix of crisp and goopy textures. I am not looking forward to cleaning the pan or the oven. Ugh.

I have actually enjoyed cooking because it's been really fun to experiment and improvise, cutting a few corners here and there. But baking? Yeah, baking is definitely a science, and when things go awry it is difficult to redeem the situation. Lesson learned.

Hang in there.

Love,

Marjorie