It perfectly describes the gung-ho approach I have to baking, and food preparation in general. I'm not bragging here, this um ... style ... of cooking and baking regularly backfires. I have a history of some godawful kitchen disasters.
No, my fearlessness is based on two things.
1. I'm lazy.
2. I'm inadequately kitted out.
For people who like to cook and eat as much as we do in this house we're woefully under-applianced.
Case in point: we have nothing with which to measure grams. Can you cope? How do you bake without being able to measure things in grams?
By guessing - not good for baking. And by using the ml/gram convertor on the last page of the Huisgenoot Wen Resepte circa 1977. Not ideal.
Also, we don't have a food processor. Nope. A stick blender and a hand-held mixer are our some-what primitive tools.
This, coupled with the laziness makes for some interesting recipe adjustments and leaps of faith. The laziness is how I come to make 'intricate' custards (read: from scratch, no instant powder involved) in the microwave. The lack of a food processor is why I made crumble with the stick-blender this evening. Surprisingly (check how I spelt that correctly), it worked.
Necessity being the mother of
Fearless I tell you.
But also a little bit skanky ...
My grandfather (the girl's great grandfather) and his somewhat exacting second wife came to tea yesterday. Firstly I cheated and whipped up a cake from a [gasp] packet for them, iced with [gasp] the last of the icing left-over from my birthday tea which I had stashed in the freezer
But where it all got a little murky was when, as my guests walked in the front door, I went into the kitchen to turn on the kettle and discovered to my horror that the cat had licked half the icing off the cake!
Options: cut half the cake away, confess, look like a skanky housewife and cast doubt as to the integrity of the rest of the cake OR,
be a skanky housewife, grab a knife, redistribute the remaining icing to cover up the disaster and serve it anyway ...
The Fearless Baker. That's me.
4 comments:
WWHHHhhaaaaaaa!!!! oh my you're my southern hemisphere sis...
Hubby saw me mixing a cake (from a box) the other night with a stick blender and asked what the hell I was doing trying to make a cake with a drink blender...eh????
however the cat lickin' thing... now that's not fearless... just skanky!!
;o)
I know I'm probably supposed to act shocked and disgusted by all of this, but I can't fake it. My cat's licked stuff, too. And I still ate it. Nobody needs to know. Now, I draw the line at big black dog licking stuff. I wouldn't even lick FRESH home-made icing off a from scratch cake after her kitty litter tongue touched it.
ew. and ugh.
But cats. Cats are pristine and sweet. And like I said. Nobody needs to know.
as a child, my mother taught me to just spread the rest of the icing over the bits the cat licked off. sadly, however, she neglected to tell me not to talk about, so i spilled the beans to the guests. i was not popular then i tell you.
Which path did you choose??? Am MOST relieved you didn't offer me cake last week, cos my brain would now be a-ticking non stop. He he he.
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