Why life is like baking

Life is like a box of chocolates. I don't think there is anyone alive who doesn't know this phrase, and when I started to write this post this is what jumped to my mind, but the truth is (and with the risk of alienating a few of my approximately ten readers) I hated the movie, and I find this phrase insulting to all chocolate. Life really isn't anything like a box of chocolates. Mainly because chocolate is what you use to make life bearable some days, but also because unlike in life, if you just flip the box, you will know what you gonna get. You might not like what you get, but it says right there on the box which one it is. No, for me, life is like baking. Because baking is unpredictable, baking is messy, baking is where you can follow a recipe to the letter and still end up with crap. Just like life.

Box of chocolates

Baking has been my passion ever since I was very very young. Younger, I think, than is acceptable these days, and it became a very big part of me. A part where there is quiet, room to breathe, and somehow a place to dump everything else - having a bad day? Bread making that includes kneading dough by hand is a wonderful way to get over that. Depressing day? there is nothing quite like a chocolate cake. Kids making enough noise to wake the dead? Out comes the mixer. Baking grounds me, gives me a sense of home, of creation. You take some flour, sugar and eggs, and you get something wonderful that wasn't there before. Just like in writing. I guess in some regard that is why I like writing - it gives me the same sense of "hey you created something out of nothing".
Also, you are never left without an answer to the "what do you want for Christmas" question. You can always have one more gadget, or special pan, or book. I have about 36 baking books (and not even one cookbook), and that is only because last time we moved Hidai made me throw out some (some nonsense about the movers not being able to lift the boxes), and I think every baking gadget known to man (until this Christmas, when I will HAVE to have something new of course).
But like everything in life, sometimes you are lost. There are these periods where everything is just too much and too overwhelming and somewhere along the way you discover that you got lost. You no longer remember how you got here, or where you were heading. I had one of those periods just now. I wanted to say "in the last month" but it wasn't true, so I wrote "in the last couple of months" but I am not sure that one is true either. I am not sure when I started being lost, I just know that last week when I watched the Great British Bake Off (the one and only baking show the kids will watch with me. And when I say that, what I really mean is Ron & I sitting on the couch watching TV, and Yon sitting on the carpet in front of the TV "baking" with his blanket. Yes, it is crazy as it sounds) I saw them baking happily in the tent, and it hit me like a ten-ton-baking-chocolate-block - I haven't baked in a long time. Also it dawned on me that I might want to tryout for the show next year, but that's a different storyline.

Watching bake off

I baked a little before my parents came over, but did nothing since then. It had been some three weeks since I last went into my kitchen. No, it was worse than that. I got 2 new baking books from my parents when they arrived, and I haven't even looked at them. I haven't sat down and studied each recipe, imagining doing it, planning how to tweak it just a little so it will be perfect for me. I haven't even found them a proper place on the shelf.  Last week I also got new kitchen scales, from Ozeri, to try and review, which after some preliminary oooohs and ahhhs I stuck in the cupboard and ignored completely.

New scales

I opened the books immediately (the next day) to check them out, but it still took me until Sunday to actually bake, because I was ill for most of last week and because as it seems every recipe in my new book, that is actually an adaptation of olden-days recipes to modern times, needed at least 6 eggs and either one kilo of cream cheese or of double cream, ingredients that I am not so sure were that handy in the olden days, and that unless I am in the midst of a baking craze, I don't ordinarily stock in my fridge. Unlike most of everything else. I do keep a very nice stock of baking ingredients, that can (and was) comparable to that of a small bakery. What? you never know what you will want to bake just this minute. Always be prepared (and also I get regular deliveries in the form of my parents, and if I am on a diet than it accumulates).

That is how it came to be that on Sunday afternoon, after watching Arsenal win a match for a change, I got my new book and my sexy new scales and set out to bake some chocolate chips cookies. That only required 2 eggs and no cream. It is a weird experience, baking when there is a lot of people and noise around, and I really did gain a new respect to the Bake-Off contenders who has to do that every week. I know they say that baking is a science and you have to follow the recipe to the letter, but I never bake anything exactly like you're supposed to. I have to change it, and every time I do it a little different, and never write it down. Didn't I tell you it's like life? I am not good at following orders. Or straight lines.
The scales were amazing though. I mean how can you review scales? If it's human scales, than accuracy is never a good thing, and if they are kitchen ones, than you want them to be very accurate, but as I always use the very accurate measurement of "it seems right to me", than all I can say is - they look so sexy, everyone around the house thought I bought a Kindle :), they are easy to store, operate and they respond very quickly. I love them, but I'm shallow and it's mostly because they are just so damn pretty. But I digress (naturally. Has to happen at least once a post).

Baking

Going back to baking, even if it was just one batch of chocolate chips cookies, it got me thinking about how some things are more than what they are, how we need those things and those places that reminds us who we are, where we belong. It might not be the most modern thing to say, but in some regard at least I belong in my kitchen, I belong in my baking. With every cookie I made I regained a little bit of myself back.