Crappy Crocker
Last week I cemented my reputation as Crappy Crocker, the Domestic Not-ess of baking. It started with an email from a nice mom who (I thought) was going to bake Halloween cookies for my daughter's class. She wanted to know how she could accommodate my daughter's gluten intolerance.
How nice, I thought. That day I bought a box of sugar cookie mix so I could give her some pre-made dough. I thought she was going to make one more cookie for my daughter, in a gluten free version.
When the nice mom and I talked at school the next day, we seemed to be talking past each other. I kept offering to bring her some dough in a baggie so she could make one more cookie. This was making her exasperated. I didn't get it. Finally, she ended the conversation by saying that she would just bring me the cookie cutters and that I would be making 24 cookies. In my entire life, I have never used cookie cutters. I happen to think that cookies in their normal round shapes taste just fine. And, I had no idea that her agenda was to get me to bake an entire batch for public consumption. Gulp. That was totally unclear in her email.
At the elementary school, I'd previously suffered abusive comments about my baking.
"I just wanted to let you know," a kindergartner scolded me a couple years ago, "the top of your cupcakes was good, but the bottom reeked."
This girl waited a full five minutes until I finished an adult conversation to tell me this.
Finally getting over my shock at being tasked with making Halloween cookies, I decided how nice it would be for my daughter to have all her classmates eating the same cookie, not even knowing they were gluten free. This was a point made by the nice mom, as well.
The night before the cookies were due, I realized we were out of vanilla, so I put the project off to the next day. I had to bring the cookies to school at 2pm, so I began at 1pm. Stupid, I know, but wasn't I a martyr for skipping lunch to bake the cookies?
I have a rolling pin that a relative gave me (out of pity for my baking skills), so I used it to roll out a giant splat of dough. I pressed the pumpkin cookie cutter into the dough, but couldn't lift the pumpkin shape without it breaking into 5 pieces. I started to get nervous.
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