Baking Day

I’ve been pursuing schedule around here – you know?  Chasing shalom and striving for order.  Conquering chaos and choosing structure.

(I have to keep working so hard at it because I keep struggling so mightily.)

I made a list of topics/ideas/subjects that I want to teach the kids and I divided those ideas up and picked one or two to focus on each day of the week.

(I really had to break this down into its simplest form for me to finally take action.  I’m a Big Ideas person.  I love The Dream.  The Ideal.  And I like to write it all down in impossibly tidy rows and schedule the mess out of it until I make the task basically impossible.  And then never do any of it.)

So Friday is Baking Day.

And on Fridays – the kids and I . . .  bake.  (You see how simple that was?)

And just to make it a little bit sweeter, I have been planning baking days around foods that have a bit of a family legacy – or at least a good story to go with them.

We have made Snickerdoodles.  (My mom loved to make those for my brothers and I as kids.)

Last week we made Monster Cookies.

Kevin’s mother would make these gigantic cookies every year around Christmas.  She would craft them all, individually wrap each one and ship them to us in an oatmeal container every year.

I have the recipe card she used and I planned ahead (!) and had everything ready.  This was my first time ever baking these monsters and I had no idea how much effort went into them.  My goodness!  Or how much oatmeal (like half the container) and how much peanut butter  (the entire jar).

But we persevered.  Mixing.  Stirring.  Dumping.  Taking turns breaking in half a dozen eggs.  Adding the bag of chocolate chips.  And then the bag of M&M’s.

The directions even said to use an ice cream scooper to shape the things.

When they were finished, baked, out of the oven and cooled, we all had a sample.

The kids approved.  Kevin ate his but I knew from his expression that they didn’t taste the same as he remembered.  But no complaints.

The day passed.  The kitchen mess was tidied.  The cookies were all lined up neatly in rows.

While preparing for dinner much later, I opened the microwave.

And sitting inside, waiting patiently, was a big bowl of melted butter.

The butter that was supposed to have been in the cookies.

Oops.

I guess that explains the difference.

Oh well – today is a new Friday.  A new Baking Day.

Up next – sweet potato muffins.

Found on a recipe card from my mother’s collection.

I figure – if they taste too much like, uh, sweet potatoes, then the non-discriminating Fox can gobble them up.