Bake On!

I have a friend who loves to cook. But, she doesn't bake. Since I like to do both, she will occasionally bring me a recipe that she finds and wants to try that requires baking and instruct me to bake it. Recently she brought me her copy of Molly Wizenberg's memoir/cookbook A Homemade Life with instructions to read it and try my hand at the blueberry raspberry pound cake recipe.

Anyone who watched the early seasons of Grey's Anatomy will understand what I mean when I say that I, like Izzy, am a stress baker. And anyone who has ever taught will understand what I mean when I say that few things in life are more futile than trying to teach a roomful of kids anything after Spring Break when they can clearly see the sun shining outside.

Those two things combined mean that my friend did not have to do any convincing to get me to bake a cake. By Friday, I had an acute need to bake. Anything and everything I could think of. Friday night I made the cake, which turned out to be positively amazing. Saturday I baked some banana bread with chocolate and crystallized ginger--something I thought sounded a little bizarre but I think ended up being quite good. Tomorrow I'm planning on baking some chocolate cupcakes with a bittersweet chocolate glaze. (All three recipes are from the book.)

The only real problem with the fact that baking is how I unwind and release stress is that I end up with a bunch of baked goods and really no one to eat them. Sometimes I take things to my students, but they really don't need the sugar right now. Sometimes I take things to school, but teachers always seem to be on diets and never want to eat anything I take in. This leaves me and my roommate. (One important thing to note is that my roommate's brother is getting married this summer, and she is making his groom's cake. This week, she decided to bake and decorate her first trial cake, so before my baking extravaganza, we already had a cake meant to feed 50 people in our kitchen. Our house looks like a bakery....only we aren't selling stuff, so there's no one to eat it but us.) So far, I've eaten just under half of my cake myself--and it's only been one day. My mouth says thanks, but I can hear my waist crying out in protest...thankfully my mouth is much louder.

I couldn't help but wish that I had a husband so there would be someone to eat and appreciate all that I baked (I also had the thought that I will probably be the greatest wife ever since for two days I basically did nothing but bake yummy food and willingly watch and analyze the NFL Draft, but that's another story for another post--although I did think of starting a list of reasons why I would be an amazing wife but then decided that would make me sound very prideful, whereas comments in passing would come off as much less full-of-myself).

But then I thought that since I plan on teaching for a while, there is probably a lot of stress baking in my future ,and I thought that since I think if I were married I would have more things to worry about, there would be even more stress baking. This made me think that I would end up with a really fat husband, and I don't particularly want that. So I guess it's a good thing that I have to spread out my baking to multiple family and friends instead of just one husband.