How do you choose what to write in your blog? According to the ‘most-liked posts’ in my Facebook timeline, my speciality should not be campervan holidays or travel adventures, it should be family baking!
Family baking … not for everyone
My kids regularly tell me how awful I am a baking. In fact everybody tells me how bad I am at putting the goods on the table. Thanks to Facebook, it’s even become a standing joke at the school gates . “Saw your dinner last night, what was that???”, “Do your boys want to come over for tea? They look as if they could do with a ‘good’ meal” and so forth. Fnar Fnar very funny.
Of course I could keep them all to myself and stop making everything a #badbakes moment but when you have a talent for making people feel better about their own miserable dinner efforts, why try to hide it?
A costly habit
The problem is that bad bakes don’t just eat (pardon the pun) into my food budget and personal time, they’ve started to make a dent in our household budget.
There was that time when my family baking mission focused on bread. I had visions of the four of us sitting around to eat delicious sourdough toast on the weekend, covering it with lashings of butter and scrambled eggs. It was more of a mirage than a vision though. To save my arms, I decided we had to buy a decent food mixer to turn out the copious loaves I planned to bake. I trawled eBay to find a good second-hand one and then instantly broke it with my second loaf. In hindsight, it was a pretty tough loaf… maybe I should have added some water to loosen it. The first loaf had been so promising… not perfect, but what first loaf is?!
Or the time when I wanted to make a cake but it kept sinking and so I decided the oven wasn’t keeping temperature. I bought a thermometer but that seemed to be as ineffective as the cooker, so I bought a new oven. Turns out the thermometer (and undoubtedly the old oven) worked just fine. Lesson learned – don’t blame your tools.