Kitchen Wreckage

I have never seen such culinary disaster as the last three days. How could I manage to fuck up this major part of my life so consistently?

The blueberry muffins, now that could have just been the aggression I was beating into the batter, or as my old boss so generously offered, the crap recipe in Moosewood. At any rate, they were not so bad blueberry biscuits in the end, but still disappointing to fail.

The apple crisp, banana bread, and carrot cake could all have been casualties of an unfamiliar kitchen with no butter. I accidentally used cake flour for the banana bread, and some roasted oats for the crisp part of the apple crisp. [Ed. Note: previous reference to these oats as "stale" has been refuted by owners of oats, who claim to eat them every day. I revise my assertion, claiming that roasted oats just weren't meant for crisp. People who want good baking could maybe leave their favourite recipes out on the counter.] But the carrot cake has no excuse for roundly sucking: everything was meticulously measured, I pulled the carrots out of the garden myself that morning, I substituted nothing for anything. My buddy offered that the Joy of Cooking is a terrible cookbook, but declined to return the banana brick to me, he wanted to keep it as an exhibit for his partner who has had to listen to me go on about baking for four months.

My memory for ingredients is pretty good, and a bit too persistent. I don't mean remembering to put them in, I mean remembering too late what I had put in. I woke myself up the night before going to NYC with the thought of how I forgot to put sugar in the banana bread. I called it the vegan co-op banana bread after that, and we ate it in that hollow late morning hour when breakfast is cooking but not nearly ready enough.

I forgot eggs in the pancakes once when Mom's mom made a rare appearance, and though we all expected to be pretty bound up by the experience, they were actually good and digestable. I have no faith that that could be repeated, the pancakes were tender and tasty because of the sheer will I put into them while listening to Grandma's wild stories of all the pictures she took of Disneyland's fancy heritage houses on the way from the ferry.

Chocolate cake doesn't bake without sugar. No amount of icing will save it. It is gross. Do not eat. Do not pass go.

To restore my good baking name I've gone back to basics, to the kid's cookbook we used growing up. I mean, there was no sugar in the house, but that should be fine because I replaced the pumpkin with overripe bananas. Right?