Baking

Did you see that mushroom cloud exploding over Southwest Florida this morning? It wasn't a nuclear accident. I was baking. I made (read "always make") a huge mess when I bake. Baking is not intuitive for me because it's straight-forward food chemistry. You must mix things in a certain order and make them a certain way; otherwise it's crap. I learned my lesson a long time ago NOT to improvise when baking as I do when cooking. Cooking is more forgiving. Baking is a dominatrix.

When the dust cloud of flour settled, I ended up with one sweet noodle kugel and six batches of hamentaschen dough. The kugel goes to our synagogue for its kiddush tomorrow, but the hamentaschen stay here. When WineGuy reminded the Wild Boys that Purim is this weekend, Wild Thing shouted, "HAMENTASCHEN!! Mom and I are making hamentaschen this weekend!" Wizard and Moose echoed, "Me, too! Me, too!" How could I refuse? Since they don't have the patience to wait for the dough to chill, I made it all this morning. That way, we can set up our assemblyline tomorrow morning: fill and pinch, fill and pinch. I figure we'll make about 5 dozen hamentaschen cookies by the time we're all done.

In addition to the traditional poppyseed, apricot and prune flavors, I'm going to try making almond, Nutella, cherry and lingonberry cookies this year. WineGuy's favorite is poppyseed. The boys and I like the fruit flavors. I spied the Nutella in the grocery store and figured I'd try it. We love hazelnut and chocolate; the critical factor is whether the Nutella blend will hold up in the oven or ooze out all over the place. Oh well, if I have to fail, it might as well be covered in a hazelnutty, chocolate mess!