If It's Not Snowing, We're Biking.

I was up late last night baking. My inability to refuse a challenge may have been partly to blame as can be seen in the following conversation between Dad and I:

Dad: Wanna go for a bike ride?
Me: I have 25 dozen cookies to make.
Dad: We’ll just go around the block. (*Note- my “block” is 12km long)
Me: But I just started the cookies.
Dad: Come on, it’s sunny out.
Me: What’s the temperature?
Dad: 5.4°C and it’s going up, and it’s sunny, so it feels warmer.
Me: But the weather network said that with the windchill it’s -1°C.
Dad: Wuss.
Me: Let’s go.



And so off we went for our bike ride. The wind was angry that day my friends, like an old man trying to return soup in a deli. Dad graciously let me take the lead, and the wind in my face. I felt like I was going backwards. Then when I got home I felt the need to take a break. And I got distracted, (gee, what a surprise) and decided to go turn a wooden bowl on the lathe. I got ¾ of the way through turning my bowl when it exploded. Kablamo! No more bowl-o. Curses, foiled again. So then I was angry and put off making cookies until later. Eventually I got myself back into the kitchen and started to make whipped shortbread, chocolate shortbread, lemon bars, traditional shortbread, chocolate mint cookies, gingerbread men, sugar cookies, chocolate peanut butter cups… it was a lot of cookies.



My oven is not big enough for a production of such magnitude. Nor do I have enough pans or silpats. I tried to get a system going so that I’d always have a pan ready to go into the oven when one came out. The problem was that I was also trying to make about 4 different kinds of cookies at once. I’ve never been good at following one recipe, let alone 4 of them. I started getting backlogged when the oven was full, all of my trays were in use, all of my bowls were in use, and the sink was full of dishes. A wiser person would have done some of the dishes, organized the kitchen, you know, something useful. Instead, I combined scraps of chocolate shortbread with scraps of traditional shortbread to make striped cookies, thus requiring me to stay up even later to bake them. At one point I even started getting delirious and seeing animals in my cookies.



Just try to tell me you can’t see the monkey in that picture. What? I think the baking needs to stop. I’m concerned that my oven is going to revolt, possibly explode like my bowl. I think I need to start eating carrot sticks. Let’s not be drastic, maybe I just need a nap. Then some ice cream… That doesn’t require heat. Mmmm ice cream… Stick a fork in me, I’m done.




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Baking + Shortbread + Lemon Bars + Cookies