Category Archives: baking disasters

After a few cold nights the bucket turns into a block of ice. I pulled the ice block out and refilled it but its a block of ice again.

Plus it really needs to be cleaned out and I can’t deal with it right now.

In the last few years I have said that January is my favorite month. It’s kind of embarrassing but I love that there are no holidays. It’s full winter so there are few activities. You don’t have to work in the yard. It’s nice to have a month to sit inside and read books and drink hot chocolate and not have to go anywhere.

I like how this guy is figure skating. The ice is very confusing to these critters.

I had notes for a post and I don’t know what happened to them and now I am a big blank.

I don’t think I wrote about my failed sweet potato pie for xmas dinner. It was edible but it wasn’t very delicious. It tasted like a vegetable side dish that someone poured sugar on and added to a pie crust. Everyone was very polite about it and said things like, “Good Pie” and “C’mon, do you ever make a pie that you think is good?”

Yes, I do. I’d made an amazing apple pie a couple weeks earlier. This was a failed pie.

While discussing with a friend and telling her I couldn’t figure out what I did wrong — she easily figured it out. I used the wrong kind of sweet potatoes. I’ve only made it a handful of times over the last many years and I’m not sure if I knew in the beginning which sweet potatoes to use or I just lucked out.

I made another pie today and it looks a lot better but I won’t be sure until we try it.

Bob likes to shop at Grocery Outlet. We call it weird foods.

He has picked up some interesting items there that we wished we could have again.

He brought home some cookies in a box that looked like it modeled itself after Girl Scout cookies.

Have you tried those cookies yet?

He asked me a bunch of times whether I tried the cookies. I thought he meant it in a “These are good, I can’t wait for you to try them” way.

I finally tried one.

It was terrible. It’s vegan and gluten free and it’s like eating lightly flavored sawdust.

Turns out, he doesn’t like them either.

I include this photo only because it looks fake or like it was commercially lit for some purpose instead of me running around with my camera trying to capture the daffodil magic.

This is a rock in the road on Highway 96

Every time I’m in my car I remember what it was I wanted to write about and the minute I get in front of my computer I can’t remember what it was.

Here are two items I remember:

One good thing about winter is that I don’t see any snails. Yes, I am thinking about snails. I bet they just hunker down in the dirt and reproduce all winter long so in the bigger scheme of things I’m not winning. But I’m going to pretend I am.

The second item is I made yet another loaf of fail bread this weekend. I received a huge bag of currants from the California desert for Christmas and I found this bread recipe where the liquid is carrot juice and you add currants and walnuts.

Here is the recipe. There’s a 15 minute video clip, too, but I don’t have the patience to watch it so I’m not going to recommend. I think that every video clip ever is too long, except for those involving the Portland Timbers. (Did I mention pre-season starts February 17? Don’t worry, I’ll remind you again. The opening match is March 3 on ESPN2 in case you want to put that on your calendar. We play New York.)

Back to my recipe, I’ll omit the details but I made two baking things at once and both failed so I’m pretty confident the problem was the yeast. The yeast packs in my cupboard all say good until 2014 but I go through it so quickly I don’t check so I probably had an old packet in there and didn’t notice.

The first rise was not too impressive but I went ahead and did the second rise and baked it. There’s no question it was a brick. But isn’t what makes bread fluffy, air? So really didn’t I just save us from having to eat a lot of air?

It tasted decent. According to Bob it’s terrific with nut butter and since there’s only one tiny wedge left, I don’t think he’s lying. I’m going to do a giant do over this weekend to either shore up my confidence or stab it in the face.