Baking: the messy craft.

Sometimes in my whirlwind of crafting, I feel inclined to do a little baking. These are the moments my husband both loves and dreads the most. While I can turn out some tasty treats, I am not fond of the cleaning up portion. By the end of a good baking spree, the kitchen looks like Siberia in a snowstorm from all the flour and I have dirtied pretty much every utensil I own.


The last little baking spree I went on was for a bake sale to support an FRG event. Here is how it went...

My mom got me this mini doughnut maker for Christmas. What better way to give it a test spin than to make several dozen mini doughnuts for the bake sale, right? Four dozen mini doughnuts later, I had two dozen that were acceptable enough for human consumption. I admit, there probably would have been more 'winning' doughnuts, but my almost three year old son, Chef BoyRowdy, was 'helping' quite a bit...


After letting the edible doughnuts cool, I iced them with pink and white icing- they looked beautiful! I gave myself a little pat on the back and moved onto the next project, a pineapple upside down cake.


Pineapple upside down cake is my favorite cake. The problem with mine, is that I love it so much that I don't care if it's pretty, as long as I can eat it. So, I whipped up a 10" round and put it in the oven. I still had enough batter left for a 4"x4" cake, so I proceeded to make one for me. While I was pouring batter in the pan, I got distracted with my youngest son and when I came back, I just finished pouring batter in and threw it in the oven. Then Chef BoyRowdy, who had been standing on a chair watching intently the whole time, started throwing a fit. He started yelling "CAR! CAR!" He had been playing with a small car toy while he was watching, and now it is nowhere to be found...I shrugged my shoulders. If there is a small car in the cake I was going to eat, so be it. I'm not going to go digging through a half baked cake because of an allegation. Time for a glass of wine. (Luckily, later I found the car was not in the cake!)

The baked goods looked great when I went to bed. Unfortunately, the icing melted off of the doughnuts in the middle of the night. It is abnormally warm where we live, and I should have put them in the refrigerator. My son still enjoyed them, so not a total loss. 

 

 

Mini doughnuts before the icing melted off

Pineapple upside down cake!

This was one of the least eventful baking sprees I had launched. Previous to this was the Christmas Truffle Extravaganza of 2009, when I made well over 200 truffles in two days (with some help from my husband) to give as Christmas gifts, and the Blackberry Pie Bake in 2006 when I made close to 20 pies to give to people I knew. My problem is, I always go too big and burn myself out. I've learned through the years to take it a little easier, but I'm still learning.