tea Tag

HERE’S the thing.  I am not particularly built for baking.

I know this sounds like false modesty… unappetisingly pretentious, especially after a consistent offering of bakery recipes in the past 2.5 years, ranging from simpler things like an imploding honey custard cake or blueberry muffin-french toasts, to more elaborate things like a gateau a la sour cream or a laminated Nutella morning bun.  Sorry if I forgot to mention my relentless pursuit of everything-biscuits, and right, you’re absolutely right, this deep-fried apple/persimmon pies, despite of myself, were eeeeeeh-pic~~

Uh-hem, ok now seriously though, truth aside (….), that when it comes to baking, I struggle with a high precipitation of unnatural disasters with only a slight chance of prevalence.  Not to mention that either ways, the day will only end sadly in tears, or, happily in fat thighs.  Baking, is a no-win situation.

But let’s just say, we don’t have problems with fat thighs.  Just saying… then why the struggle?  Well… I was born, with a medical birth defect, which disallows me to follow recipes… precisely.  There.  It’s a chemical imbalance in my brain creating an illusion that makes me believe I am, at the very least, marginally smarter than a cookie-dough.  Turns out… I am not.  No one is.  But this condition has grown resistant even to such keen awareness, to a point that… I can’t even follow my own recipes!  At this very moment as we speak, a batch of brownie lies mutilated on a white sheet of parchment, recipe of which was tested, then tested, and thus theoretically foolproofed for people like myself, who’s really good at fucking up a recipe… yet I still did.  Would it have killed me to swap 1/2 of the chocolate with peanut butter?  No, no it wouldn’t at all.  So instead, it killed the brownies.  Certainly not the only dead thing here…  A runny banana bread batter – not a pie-filling makes.  Ricotta pastry cream – yikes.

I’m bringing this up at a very carefully timed juncture, a serene and orderly period right before the tsunami of holiday-pastry-season hits, so I have enough chance to reflect and ponder on my illness.  Who am I but a good-hearted amateur baker – guided by presumed logics, set out to make the recipe-world more interesting, if not tastier – only to be haunted by unintended consequences.  A walking cautionary tale marked with a bloody scarlet A-for-effort, and the stain of broken whipped cream.  But if to tackle this illness fundamentally, means to obey a recipe unquestionably, then what is my trickling value in recipe-blogosphere without adding personal inputs?