Saturday, August 10, 2013

The Fruits Of My Free Time: Baked Goodies


I would like to thank our Muslim Friends for sparing our nation with a holiday. Aside from being well-behaved people of society, granting non-muslims with a free day makes me respect them even more. With that said, let me take the initiative to appreciate them again with another thank you!

While the Allah believers were breaking their fasting rituals with their respective celebrations underway, I found myself in bed at around 5am just staring at the ceiling. I was thinking long and hard about what to do with the free day. I tried to think and nothing rang but my utter need for more sleep. I wanted to be productive but a crapload of "nah" was dominating my soul. Just before I took vengeance against all the stressful days that preceded the day, I got a whiff of what i was sure to be a chocolate chip cookie. I earnestly dragged myself up just to find where the smell came from. Everyone in the house was still fast asleep so no one's whipping up something in the kitchen. Then I remembered that I bought myself a piece of dark chocolate macadamia nut cookie from Starbucks the night before which I forgot to eat. When I opened my bag, I realized that the cookie escaped the paper baggie!!! It was a horror to see that it had crumbled and made a mess inside. The bits adhered to my perfume bottle, wallet and my bag's bottom lining. Worse, the chocolate melted and it stained my book and notebooks. Such a waste. I hate to waste food but at least my olfactory sense indulged as I swiped every cookie crumb and chocolate off my bag. Next thing I knew, I was already in the kitchen rekindling my love affair with a long time hobby.




If the photo of the wire whisk above is not enough indication, I love to bake and i'm proud to say that I got it from my momma! I started baking since I was in my mother's womb. Exaggerating again but you know the drill. Behavioral modeling, that's what how we should properly call it. To clarify, I can bake but I can't cook. Those are two separate kitchen skills.

Every baker has an innate and profound sense of attachment to flour, sugars, chocolate, milk and vanilla. In my case, I have those ingredients in stock all year round for when the time comes that I want to get my hands laden with sticky doughy goodness. I've made hundreds of cookies, caramel bars, and crinkles that I gave away to friends and family for special occasions. I was even appointed as the class baker in grade school whose main contribution during christmas parties were my signature profiteroles. Most of the people who fed on my creations were nice enough that so far, no one had the heart to tell me that what I made was bad--err at least not in my face. I'm assumingly a decent baker. I'm not formally trained but i've been baking long enough that i've learned a lot of foolproof recipes and had my share of kitchen mishaps from burning my eyebrows, measuring wrong proportions to a point of creating a crime scene by splattering red food coloring all over the kitchen counter. I've also learned to establish a relationship with reliable brands that I purchase on a regular basis and, unfortunately, learned to snob those that yielded poor results. I also got to pick up several tricks of the trade on how to achieve, say, the much coveted thick and chewy chocolate chip cookie, among others. 

So without further ado, I present to you the fruits of my free time:







I'll be sharing the process on how to prepare yummy chocolate chip cupcakes with buttercream frosting in the succeeding post! 

How about you, what's your favorite baking recipe?

Stay Happy,
Khaye :)

No comments:

Post a Comment